


"Don't you want your heart eaten?" asked the fire

by andwhatyousaid, carbonbased000



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Howl's Moving Castle Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Coffee, Eyeliner, Happy Ending, M/M, Magic, Pete Wentz Is Sad, Possessiveness, Slow Burn, True Love, fire demons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:34:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24536272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andwhatyousaid/pseuds/andwhatyousaid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/carbonbased000/pseuds/carbonbased000
Summary: In which Pete is an emo wizard who worries far too much about his hair and Patrick is a completely average guy who talks to guitars. Featuring fire demons, a sentient house, glam parties and weird musical instruments.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Comments: 100
Kudos: 65
Collections: Lights! Camera! Peterick!





	1. In which Patrick talks to guitars

**Author's Note:**

>   
>   
>    
> 
> 
> This story is based on both the [film](https://www.studioghibli.com.au/howlsmovingcastle/) and the [book](https://www.amazon.com/Howls-Moving-Castle-World-Howl/dp/006441034X) version of _Howl’s Moving Castle_. In fact, if you have read the book, you may notice a few lines worked their way in, including the title. While it is not necessary to have viewed the film to follow along, we highly recommend it (and so does [Pete Wentz](http://betterwithapen.xyz/wp-content/uploads/pete_wentz_s_tattoo.jpg) himself)!
> 
> In case you haven’t seen the film and need some atmospheric assistance: please find our cultivated emo wizard tag [here](https://carbonbased000.tumblr.com/tagged/emo-wizard-vibes) and [here](https://andwhatyousaid.tumblr.com/tagged/emo-wizard-vibes), and this carefully selected [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1x1TGPEHM9kEADKNWXYwSu?si=I8XhAtw8RkKkcP7ds2AcqQ), which you can listen along to as you read for a fully immersive experience. 
> 
> Heartfelt thanks to the ever-kind EGT for the beta read! Ten thousand hands clasped in prayer emojis plus sparkles. 
> 
> Heartfelt thanks to you, too, for choosing to read. This has been an absolute labor of love, and we hope you can feel that as you get lost in this special little world with us. 
> 
> Oh, and it's Pete's bday today! We <3 him, and we hope he never reads this, but we think he would appreciate it a lot if some of us made a donation to BLM [here](https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/). 
> 
> For the [Lights Cameras Peterick Challenge](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/lightscamerapeterick2020). Many thanks to the organizers! Please don’t forget to read the other entries and show some love to the authors.

“I’m not coming to your party,” Patrick said for the seventy thousandth time.

“It’s not my party,” Joe clarified, attempting to adjust the knot of his vintage silk tie and making it much worse. “It’s an industry party. That kind where you meet people who can help you find a more interesting job. You know, _connections_.”

“I don’t need _connections_ , I’m perfectly happy here.” Patrick got up from his work table with a sigh. “C’mon, let me, you’ve made a mess of that,” he said, and untied Joe’s tie — a deep navy with small burnished gold polka-dots, off-setting Joe’s eyes. It was a beautiful tie — all the more reason not to murder it with a crooked simple knot.

The silk felt alien under Patrick’s fingers, too smooth and weightless compared to the wood and metal he was used to. While he worked, Joe looked at him intently, and eventually said, “I know you hate networking. You don’t have to. You can come and just… have fun.” 

“By which you mean I should hook up with someone,” Patrick said, and since he was done with Joe’s tie, he gave him a little bump in the middle of the chest, and if he hit Joe a bit harder than he’d meant, well. 

“Ouch,” said Joe, “but okay, I’m giving up. Forgive me for wanting to spend some time with my brother before I tour for two weeks! _I’m_ going, don’t have too much fun alone with your stringed friends.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” Patrick fake-laughed, then waved Joe away. “And you’re welcome!” 

“Thank you for fixing my tie!” Joe yelled over his shoulder, already half out the shop door, and then it banged shut, and Patrick was alone. He turned the sign in the window to CLOSED, switched off the lights outside, and locked the door. 

“He’s the one who should hook up with someone,” he said to the white Gretsch with the sharp silver stripes down its body that he was restringing. His hands moved deftly between the metal strings, curling them precisely and carefully with his fingers, bending them to his will.

As he worked, Patrick admitted to himself that his life was rather dull. Instead of telling this to the Gretsch, he left it on the table, patting its neck in apology, and took down one of his own acoustics from the wall hanger — the black Martin. He didn’t feel like writing, didn’t even know what he was playing, exactly — just snippets of songs flowing into each other. He focused on the sound, coaxing harmonics out of the guitar, then moving on to chord progressions. 

When he practiced like this, he usually did settle into playing something, eventually, often without really noticing. This time it wasn’t different — until he heard the doorbell ring behind him and he startled, the pick making a discordant jangling sound against the strings. 

He turned around, and saw someone standing just inside the shop entrance. The figure was dressed indistinguishably in all black, standing in the shadows, and very still. Patrick couldn’t see their face, but he didn’t even care to see it, since — “I’m sorry, the shop is closed. I thought I’d locked the door already.” In fact, he was pretty sure he’d locked up. Oh well, maybe he’d just thought about doing it and then forgot; it wouldn’t be the first time.

The person took a step forward, and the shadows seemed to cling to his features for a second before falling away. It was a man, his face still half-hidden by the hood of a black jacket, but Patrick could see enough to make out his expression — he looked stricken, almost bewitched. 

“Keep singing,” the stranger said, in a rough voice.

“What? I wasn’t—” Patrick started to say, but then his brain rewound the audio and he realized he had in fact been singing when the doorbell rang. _Life on Mars_. “I _don’t_ sing,” he corrected himself. “And in any case, as I said, the shop is closed. We open at 10 tomorrow.”

The stranger didn’t come any closer, but some more shadows seemed to glide off his skin, revealing him. He was — well, he was really hot, actually, like, excellent bone structure there, no question, but his eyes were as dark as a movie vampire’s — ringed with black, like smudged eyeliner and exhaustion. His gaze was slightly lowered, hovering around Patrick’s hands on the guitar, but then he looked up and said, “Please forgive me, that was so rude,” and he smiled. 

Although _he smiled_ wasn’t adequate by far to describe the thing that had just happened in Patrick’s shop. It was like… like the sun breaking through the clouds after a rainstorm. Like the sunlight glittering off the ocean. The shop was near dark, but that _smile_ made it seem like a million fairy lights had been suddenly strung on every surface. Patrick didn’t usually think in pretty metaphors, but at the moment he didn’t realize this, or didn’t care. He just stared. (Possibly Joe might have been right about how long it had been since he’d hooked up with someone.) 

“I was hiding in the doorway, and when I heard Bowie, I just had to see,” the stranger went on, and Patrick stared some more. 

“Uhm, sorry, but that is _not_ an explanation that makes sense. Hiding from what? See what?”

“See who was singing, of course. Oh, and I’m being chased by someone. The paps,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “you know how it is.”

“I really don’t, but— I guess you could go out through the back? Would that help?”

“That would be perfect, thank you,” the stranger said, smiling again. This smile wasn’t any less beautiful than the first, but at least it didn’t send Patrick’s brain in overdrive. “But first, could I bother you for five more minutes, shake off my tail? I don’t think they even saw me come in here.” 

“Sure,” Patrick said, helplessly. And then realized he was still staring, half-twisted on his stool, guitar still in his lap. Trying to shake off the odd mood, he slipped off the guitar strap and stood up to put the Martin back on its hanger. 

Behind him, the stranger made a sad sound. “Won’t you play anymore?” he asked, his voice closer.

Patrick scoffed, and started to half-heartedly tidy up, lining up the tools and wiping down the work table with a rag. “I’m not a musician. I just fix stuff.”

“You fix… musical instruments?”

“Yep. Repairs and restoration and setup... anything, really. Do you play?” Patrick asked, and finally turned around. The stranger’s face, now that he’d come closer, was distantly familiar. Maybe he was in a band. Judging from the way he was dressed, he was probably not, like, an accountant. 

“Kind of,” he replied, but didn’t elaborate. 

“You can take a look around, if you like. Those are for sale,” Patrick said, pointing at the small selection of vintage guitars in the corner. Maybe this weird, handsome, charming person could become a customer! Joe was always going on about him not having any talent for promotion, but he wasn’t doing that bad, now, was he? Take that, Joe! 

The stranger took a look around — in less than two minutes, because the shop was one room, and not even at all a big one. But he made _hmm_ and _ooh_ noises, and then came back to stand close to Patrick. 

“You know, I just realized I could use someone to take a look at my music room. My gear is probably in a state. Like, super awful,” he told Patrick, earnestly, and all Patrick could think was that from up-close he was kind of _breathtaking_. His eyes were an undefinable color, the warmest brown, and they seemed to reflect a fire that wasn’t burning anywhere in the room. 

Then Patrick realized what the guy had said, and he blurted out, somewhat dazedly, “Music room? Who _are_ you, Mr. Darcy?”

The stranger laughed. It was a full-body thing, too loud by half, and it ended with him burying his face into his palms trying to stop. His laugh wasn’t graceful or elegant or captivating, and whatever spell Patrick had been under, it was smashed into pieces, and he could suddenly see him under a new light — less improbably handsome, less diamond-bright. Still pretty, still golden, just softer and messier. _That’s better_ , Patrick thought.

“Sorry, sorry,” the stranger said, “it’s just that no one’s compared me to an Austenian hero before. I know it’s ridiculous, but I have a big house and I just… put all the music stuff in one room. It’s more like a study, really.”

“I mean,” Patrick agreed, mildly. “I don’t blame you, like, if I had a guest room, it would become a home studio _so fast_.”

“Right. But you’re not a musician.”

Patrick felt heat rise to his face, the kind that meant he was blushing violently. He had his reasons, good ones even, like never quite finding the right words to thread through his melodies, but they never sounded right when he said them out loud. He mumbled something in the negative. The stranger gave him a curious look, but then took pity on him and changed the subject, asking, “So, do you make house calls?” 

“Yeah, if you have something that can’t be moved. What would you need us to take a look at?”

“Well, I have a Bösendorfer that hasn’t been tuned in, like, _ages_.”

“You have a Bösendorfer and you keep it _out of tune_ , are you _crazy_?” Patrick asked, scandalized, belatedly remembering that he wasn’t supposed to talk that way about customers — at least not to their faces. This was precisely why Joe dealt with people in the front of the store — when he was in town at least — while Patrick stayed mostly in the back and talked to guitars.

The stranger, though, seemed unbothered. “Well, maybe. But anyway— will you come?”

“Sure,” said Patrick, and trying to reshape the conversation into some kind of normalcy: “Let me look at my diary, and—”

At that moment, there was a chime reverberating through the shop. It sounded like tubular bells, a bright echoing vibration that didn’t stop until the stranger pulled his hand out of his pocket and gently tapped two fingers on the silver necklace he was wearing. They were really standing quite close, now, and Patrick could see the engraving on the pendant — a waning crescent moon and stars. The stranger looked back over his shoulder towards the shop window and the dark street, hummed softly, then turned back to look at Patrick. 

“I’ll call you,” he said, suddenly looking as beautiful and artificial as before he’d burst out laughing. _Yeah, right, sure you will_ , Patrick thought. “Back door that way, I’m guessing?”

“Straight through there,” Patrick said, pointing dejectedly to the curtained doorway that led to the tiny back room of the shop. He felt an acute sense of loss at the idea of this stranger disappearing from his life, even though he’d known him for all of ten minutes. It was probably the strong feeling that, without any tangible proof, the memory of their meeting would fade, like a very good dream that you can’t quite grasp in the morning. 

“Can I ask you a question?” the stranger asked, pulling the curtain aside with one hand. 

Patrick thought _, You’ve done nothing but that since you came in_ , but he nodded anyway. 

“Why did you help me?”

“Uhm,” Patrick said, thinking of an answer less embarrassing than: _You’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen in my life_ , and less downright mortifying than: _I just realized I lead the dullest life and I feel so fucking lonely_. In the end, he came up with: “’Cause you like Bowie.”

“I do,” the stranger said. “But I like you more.”

Patrick felt himself blush again, even worse than before, judging from the way his cheeks burned. He didn’t know where to begin in answering that, so it was lucky that he was already alone. 


	2. In which a villain makes a phone call

It was morning, or perhaps midday — early afternoon at the latest. The watch Pete wore didn’t tell the time, and his phone was lying facedown on the silky burgundy bedspread, just out of reach from where he was sitting in front of the vanity table, half-dressed in boxers and the soft black t-shirt he’d slept in, getting ready for whatever was left of the day. Flat-iron in one hand, silver hand-mirror in the other, he twisted his arm uncomfortably up and back, trying to reach the hair behind his head — and failing. “Ow,” he said to no one, putting down the flat-iron and resolving to use a spell before he seriously hurt himself, though straightening spells never came out quite right. 

He angled the hand-mirror so that he could see the back of his head and whispered the incantation under his breath, moving his fingers the correct way — like a mime pretending to grab an invisible lock out of thin air and pulling. He looked again in the small mirror and decided that was probably as good as it was going to get. 

“Calcifer,” he called out, examining his fringe now. It was good enough from the right, falling just over his eye, but the left side, where the hair was shorter and tended to stick up, needed some more product. “I need to call a guy for our piano. Could you remind me later?”

Pete’s phone beeped rudely from the bed. “I’m not your fucking secretary,” it said in the demon’s crackling voice — his classic tone for mild irritation, usually at Pete, usually because Pete had dared to ask him for a favor, like heating up the water for his coffee in the morning, or checking who was at one of the doors through the surveillance cameras. Pete smoothed a few drops of potion into his hair, finally managing to tame the fly-aways. 

“Please, Calcifer?” he crooned, and a long-suffering sigh was heard from the huge, turned-off flat-screen TV mounted above the fireplace. Calcifer’s image appeared in the lower right corner, just the orange and pale blue flame flickering and then his round eyes and squashed oval mouth. Pete couldn’t help smiling, though he knew that that wasn’t actually Calcifer’s face, and smiling back at thin air would have been just as effective. 

“ _Fine_ ,” the flame said, “but I’m a very powerful fire demon, and I keep this whole contraption going and let you use all my considerable magic, and you shouldn’t exploit me like this, you know!”

There was a knock on the doorframe and Andy came into Pete’s bedroom, cutting off Calcifer’s complaint — which was just as well, since they all knew it by heart. “Can I use your laptop? I need to take a look at your schedule, but it seems like the house has hidden mine.” 

“Sure, go ahead,” Pete said, and — as Andy was already sitting down at the desk under the window and booting up Pete’s MacBook Pro, and didn’t seem to want to engage in further conversation — “Calcifer, could you ask the house to give back Andy’s laptop?”

Before Calcifer could answer, or grouse some more, Pete’s phone started ringing — or, more accurately, playing _Bad Romance_. Pete let it play — what a catchy song; the chorus was really genius, so Nineties. They were all aware that it was a custom ringtone, and who it meant was calling. Andy looked up from the laptop screen, meeting Pete’s eyes in the vanity mirror. “Shouldn’t you answer that?”

Pete’s reflection rolled his eyes at him while the Pete in the real world sighed heavily. “ _Yeah_.” He picked up the phone — sure enough, there it was: Perez Hilton’s name and fake, vicious smile looking up at him from the screen — and took the call, putting it on speaker. 

Perez clicked his tongue. “Making me wait, sweetheart? That’s not very nice.”

“What do you want?” Pete bit back. In the mirror, Andy looked at him in concern. He was right, too — it was never a good idea to piss Perez off. He had ways of making Pete sorry, of course, more than anyone else except maybe Pete himself. 

“Feeling rebellious, I see,” Perez’s voice said, mocking, and Pete winced. 

“Sorry, it’s not the best time — I just woke up,” he tried, not meeting Andy’s eyes. He started lining up the make-up that was scattered messily over the marble top of the vanity, affecting an indifference he wished he could really feel. “What’s up?”

“What’s _up_ is you were reckless and indiscreet, as usual, weren’t you, _dear.”_

 _What the fuck_ , Andy mouthed in the mirror, frowning, and Pete shrugged. He sincerely had no idea what Perez was talking about, not this time. He hadn’t gone out and got drunk in a really long time — how drunk he got in the privacy of his own home was a question between him and no one else; well, maybe Andy, who had to deal with his hangovers — and his recent dalliances had all been fabricated, approved and orchestrated by the very person that was berating him on the phone. He hadn’t been in the mood for a real hook-up for a fucking long time — not that _real_ was much of an option anymore. “I have no idea what—” he started to say, but Perez interrupted. 

“He was cute, I’ll give you that. A bit young, though — that wouldn’t do,” he said, almost sweetly at first, but then raised his voice until he was almost growling: “Oh, right, and also you’re fucking _straight_ and _I_ get to veto who you date. Or did you forget?”

Pete stared hard at his eyeliner pencils, now perfectly aligned against the far edge of the table, where it met the mirror. He couldn’t bear to look at Andy, nor at his own face anymore, but felt sure his cheeks were red — that almost never happened to him, not even when he drank. Apparently, shame was more potent even than hard liquor. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Calcifer’s flame blazing on the TV screen, orange to azure and back to orange again. He swallowed around the lump in his throat, brought his chin up and straightened his shoulders. He was a powerful wizard, and a celebrity, and many other things that no one knew about, and also a motherfucking adult. 

“I’m not dating anyone,” he told the voice on the phone. 

“Not yet,” the voice on the phone immediately snapped back. “But soon. Anyway, I took care of the boy from last night. You’re welcome.”

“You had me fucking _followed_ last night, so you know as well as me that there was no—” Oh. _Life on Mars_. Right. “You fucking didn’t.”

“I fucking do what I want. Oh, please,” Perez drawled, “don’t worry your pretty little head, he’s not dead. Just less cute now, so you won’t be tempted anymore. I know you have trouble keeping it in your pants, so really, I was only helping. You should be _thanking_ me.”

“Thanking—? _Fuck you._ ” Pete spit out, and threw the phone across the room. He heard Andy’s chair scrape against the floor and felt Andy’s arm around his shoulders before he realized he was going to slide to the floor. He let Andy take his weight and settled down on the soft Persian rug, resting his back against the legs of his armchair. His throat was seizing up, his eyes burning; he felt painfully aware of the magic-filled hole where his heart used to be, of the power pumping his blood full of adrenaline just as his heart used to do. 

“Pete, what was that about?” Andy asked, gently, and his gentleness was maybe the worst thing — Pete didn’t deserve it, not when he’d started getting innocent people involved in his trainwreck of a life. He was so selfish and stupid and he’d gotten that boy cursed, that kind boy with that stunning voice now surely turned into something hideous from one of Perez’s garbage, borrowed spells; a perfect boy, living his perfect life, quiet and safe and full of music and devoid of magic, and now he was certainly lost and scared and in mortal peril, and, worst of all, he wouldn’t ever sing for Pete anymore and it was entirely Pete’s fault. He shouldn’t have gone into that shop; he should have just let Perez’s minions take their fucking pictures — what was he even trying to protect anyway. He barely had a private life anymore… He’d heard that voice and he’d had to follow it, to see — like a stupid moth lured by a flame. Except he was the one who destroyed everything he touched. What a selfish, heartless bastard. 

“What’s his name?” Andy asked, startling Pete and making him realize he’d been anxiously babbling all of that aloud. 

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I didn’t ask. I think I gave him a card? I was going to call him today, to come look at our piano. I told Calcifer before…” 

Upon hearing his name, the little flame in the corner of the TV blazed up until it was filling most of the screen — which meant the demon was angry on his behalf, and between that and Andy’s calming touch, Pete started breathing more easily, thinking more clearly.

He stood up, shaking off Andy’s objections, hurriedly dressing himself — black jeans and his leather jacket with the big hood to hide in. “Oh god, he’s going to hate me.” 

“I mean,” Andy said. “He’s probably a frog by now, or a rat. Could you really blame him?”

“That’s like, the _best_ case scenario. Okay,” Pete said, determined, “I’m going out to look for him.”

“Don’t you have a spell for that?” Andy asked.

“Of course I have a spell!” Pete said, impatiently. “But we’re out of gold powder.”

“Weird, I thought we just bought ten pounds...”

“Well, yes, but I used it up for that thing, you know, for the children’s hospital.” Pete said, examining the remains of his phone lying sadly on the floor, then looked up at Andy, who was giving him a weird stare. “Anyway, location spells only work on Wednesdays, really. Wait, is it Wednesday?”

Something was going on with Andy’s face — Pete watched him as he opened his mouth as if he was going to speak, but then nothing came out and he just shook his head. 

“It’s Friday, genius,” Calcifer cut in. “And give me that.” 

Pete moved closer to the TV. A small ball of energy — like gold lightning — came out of the screen and hit the phone, nicking Pete’s thumb in the process. Pete dutifully thanked Calcifer and didn’t complain about the damage to himself, which he thought very thoughtful and mature of him — there was no time to waste, anyway. He had to go save a life. 

  
  



	3. In which Patrick enters into a mansion and a bargain

Waking from a strange dream, Patrick found himself alone in his bed, just like every day — except he was aching everywhere and his throat was horribly dry, as parched as that time with the worst hangover of his life, the morning after Joe had fed him vodka shot after vodka shot when they’d gone out to celebrate the opening of their shop. Although he didn’t remember drinking — he’d just been working, the night before, and then... Suddenly, it came back to him: the stranger who’d come in through the locked door, and then that creepy phone call asking after him, and then — darkness. 

He reached for his phone and gasped as he saw his own hand — it was wrinkled, with darker spots on the back and horribly bony knuckles. He threw off the covers and looked down — it was the body of an old man, skinny legs and papery skin. He took a deep breath, which felt like an effort. 

“There,” the man on the phone had said last night, his tone bitingly tart, after Patrick had refused to confirm or deny whether or not a certain hooded figure conspicuously dressed in all black had come into his shop earlier, finding the very inquiry oddly violating and demanding. “Let that teach you to meddle with things that belong to me. And by the way, you won’t be able to tell anyone you’re under a spell.” And Patrick had thought, _What an absolute asshole,_ but also, _What a completely insane person_ , and though he didn’t feel the need to revisit the first assessment, the second might have been premature. 

Eventually, he got out of bed — his joints creaking as he moved. He got out of bed _very slowly_. “Well,” Patrick said to himself in the bathroom mirror, sighing. His face was as pale and crumpled as a balled-up piece of paper that someone had tried to smooth out with questionable results. He still had his hair — small mercies — but instead of its usual red gold, it was a silvery white. He lifted one drooping eyelid and then let it fall back into place. “This makes sense.” 

Somehow, he couldn’t find it in himself to be — perhaps as bothered as he’d _ought_ to. He felt that he now looked more like what he really was; he was always saying that he was an old man already, inside. _Be careful what you joke about_ , he thought distantly. 

He got dressed as if this were a regular day, while he tried to throw together some sort of plan. He supposed he should be grateful that his clothes still fit, though the jeans were a little more roomy around his now spindly legs. He needed to find the stranger from last night — and have a fucking word with him, since he’d gotten Patrick _cursed_ , like in a fairytale, or one of his grandmother’s stories from her younger days, when magic was much more common, beautiful and dangerous, and you had to be careful not to step on anyone’s toes, especially if they were a wizard. Nowadays, it was at best extremely rare, rumored to be extinct or nearly so — only weirdos and very old people talked about it, or wished for its return. And yet, apparently, magic was actually real, and _of course_ Patrick would only find out by being caught in the middle of someone else’s drama. 

Perhaps that’s what the stranger was, then — a wizard. Patrick wouldn’t have found it hard to believe that that ethereal, sort of unnaturally gorgeous person was somehow made of magic. But he never told Patrick his name, just that he’d call him about the piano, and who knew if he actually would. Patrick didn’t feel like waiting around for some guy to call him — magic or not. 

He sighed, and suddenly shuddered as a chilling draft that never seemed to bother him before blew through the windows. He picked up the gray cardigan he must have thrown carelessly over the back of the couch the previous night, and as his hands meandered into his pockets in thought, his fingers stumbled across something odd and ill-fitting. He pulled it out and had to adjust his glasses, but assessed that it was a card — almost like a calling card, of some sort.

It was thicker than parchment, or the receipt paper Patrick used for his shop, and had carefully scripted [_All true treasure lies within,_](https://roninbypw.com/collections/apparel/products/white-moon-tee-1) around the same crescent moon symbol from the necklace on the stranger last night. No phone number, no email, no Twitter — nothing actually useful. It was probably more magic fuckery, but what else was he supposed to do? 

He turned it over and there it was: an address, at least, somewhere in Echo Park. He grabbed his work-bag, and — _very slowly_ — set out the front door.

  
  


Outside the sloping street, cars whizzing down Sunset Boulevard and obnoxiously blaring their horns at one another, Patrick stood and stared down at the card, then back to the shop door in front of him. Confusingly, the building numbers weren’t displayed above the door or on the curb out front, but address numbers from the mini-mart with a pink dog logo on one side and the 24/7 TATTOO shop to the other allowed Patrick to deduce that this middle door, about as successful in its attempt at dressing inconspicuously as the stranger last night had been (which is to say not at all), must be it.

It beckoned him closer, so Patrick squared his shoulders and nodded once definitively to himself, and then reached for the curving, oxidized metal feather that served as a door-handle, jingling the bell above that signaled an entry, and found at last, some confirmation: right there at the curve of the threshold arcing over him, he saw, inset as if whispered on by smoke, the address numbers. 

The door shuttered closed behind Patrick. Among a clean, welcoming scent like the herbal and slightly hypnotic one that drifted in from the yoga studio next door to his own shop, he was vaguely surprised by the absolutely typical nature of the store: as if normal people sold jewelry here. 

However, the place was deserted, except for several strategically placed glass cases lined with plush velvet that displayed glittering pieces: a ring shaped as a two-headed snake with mismatching jeweled eyes next to larger, bulkier rings that seemed just as elegant and sleek despite their size, and long, hanging necklaces. He walked closer to check the sign on one of the cases, but upon his approach, it seemed incomprehensible — no, it was written in reverse, and once he understood that, he could somehow read it easily: _Please do not tap on the glass_ , it said, and for a dizzy second Patrick felt like he was looking through the emerald and ruby eyes of one of the tiny metal snakes trapped inside, but that feeling disappeared as soon as he shook his head, frowning. Beyond the cases against the wall was a single, silver clothing rack, unmarked by gender, containing a few simple pieces — t-shirts and hoodies in soft whites and greys emblazoned with the ever-present crescent moon symbol.

“Hello?” Patrick called out into the space, temporarily surprised by the timbre of his own voice. “I’m here about a piano?” He tried, figuring he shouldn’t start babbling about spells and aging curses until he had a clearer idea of who he was dealing with — well, should anyone actually reveal themselves. 

Finally, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, towards the back of the shop — something warm-colored and wavering, like a flame. As he walked nearer, he saw that it was indeed a fire, a small orange blaze flickering from an incense burner that hung low from the ceiling and looked just like the ones Patrick remembered from his occasional visits to church as a child. He couldn’t help getting closer still, and staring, until he suddenly was imagining a face in the flames. He shook his head slightly, trying to rid himself of the vision — not only had his eyesight worsened, making everything just this side of blurry, but now he was seeing things that weren’t there, and to make matters worse he ached all over, pain yo-yoing through his body. There was a low bench built into the wall and, suddenly exhausted, he slumped down onto it. He would just rest a while as he waited — someone would certainly appear, eventually. 

Who knew being old would be so taxing? He found himself thinking of his grandmother again, and her stories — there was one in particular, which had scared him out of his mind as a child, about a wizard who ate the hearts of innocent boys. “I hope this guy is not the kind of wizard who eats people’s hearts,” Patrick muttered to himself. 

“Don’t you want your heart eaten?” asked the fire. 

Patrick sat up, startled. It was definitely the fire that spoke — the little black mouth moved as the words came, in a crackling voice like burning wood. “Obviously not,” Patrick answered. “What are you?” 

“A fire demon,” answered the black mouth. Patrick looked at the fire helplessly, thinking dazedly that though of course he didn’t have any experience with fire demons, and the idea of them sounded quite scary, this one looked affable, at least; then the creature’s round eyes widened and the flame rose up as if in enthusiasm, popping excitedly like someone had poured salt over it. “Oh, a piano, you said? You must be _him_ then! You should come in, he’s been looking for you everywhere.”

Patrick felt more stupid and slow and out of his depth by the second — who was looking for him? He thought he was already inside the shop? The fire smiled at him, perhaps in an attempt at reassurance — though its smile was quite too full of pointy flame-teeth to settle Patrick’s nerves, or anyone’s for that matter — and shot off a small tendril of fire, a tiny flame-arm with a tiny flame-hand that was pointing to the wall on Patrick’s left. 

There in the back of the shop, appeared a door where no door had been before. It was incongruous with the stripped-down decor, the dark mahogany trim heavily decorated with spirals and curlicues and arcane rune-like symbols. Patrick stood up from the bench and started walking to the door, as if in a dream.

“Go on, it’s okay,” said the demon’s croaky voice, though it wasn’t coming from the incense burner anymore, but rather from a small electronic contraption, kind of like a video intercom, that was affixed to the wall on the side of the door — and indeed, as Patrick got closer, he could see something orange flickering in the small display, a tiny flame with an even tinier face that looked like the cartoon version of the creature he’d just been talking to. “I’m buzzing you in.”

The door clicked open, and Patrick knew with sudden clarity that this was his last possible chance to turn on his heels and go back home. He pictured his one-bedroom apartment in generic West L.A. — his unmade bed, the mess of clothes spilling from the closet, the crates full of records lined against the wall, the bright green of the devil’s ivy hanging above the old peeling bathtub, the little window with a broken latch above the kitchen sink overlooking Rancho Park and the rows of homes sloping next to his. He wasn’t ready for things to change, but that choice had been taken out of his hands — in the span of a blink, he made a wish not to lose himself completely and, with his next breath, pushed open the door. 

  
  


As Patrick stumbled through the door and into a shadowy hallway, he couldn’t help but think back to a discussion he’d once had with Joe, aided by a few glasses of red and some weed, about what teleportation would feel like. Patrick had maintained that it wouldn’t feel like anything — you would simply see your surroundings change in a flash — while Joe had objected that teleporting was basically instant cloning, and then had realized with horror that you would be actually dying every time you teleported, proceeding to freak himself out until Patrick distracted him by way of feeding him donuts and putting on _Blonde on Blonde_. Curiously, they had been both right: teleporting — the magical kind, at least — didn’t feel like anything at all, and at the same time it felt like dying. Just very, very briefly. 

Patrick dusted off his cardigan, straightened his glasses, and turned around. The door had closed itself; it looked different on this side — the wood was a lighter color, perhaps oak, and the design much simpler, though clearly an expensive sort of simple. There was no trace of the weird intercom contraption, just a complicated-looking diamond-shaped knob with a different color on each side — red, blue, green, and black. 

“Fire… demon?” he called out, twisting around, finding himself alone in a strange place for the second time that day. Receiving no answer, he took in the rest of the house — because he was clearly standing at the entrance of a house, an entire house that had been somehow hiding behind that impossible door. This space had no discernible relation to the jewelry shop — it was warm and full of color, framed paintings and drawings of disparate styles and sizes all over the walls and soft-looking, mismatched rugs on the hardwood floor. A stairway rose along the wall on the far side; several doors opened upon the hallway. Patrick registered a pull towards the third on the left — like magic, which it probably was — and feeling once again as if he didn’t have much choice in the matter, he closed the distance and pushed open that door, too. 

It was a spacious room with beautiful light coming in through a row of French doors, crammed full of objects and trinkets of every sort, mismatched furniture — a desk, a few chairs and stools, a coffee table with a bunch of multicolored crystals scattered on the mirrored top; large white dust sheets draped over what looked like a big couch and a pair of armchairs, their hems trailing to the floor — and, right in the center of the room, the most beautiful piano Patrick had ever seen. 

He couldn’t resist sitting down on the padded bench in front of it — and besides, he’d already gotten tired again. He raised the fallboard to reveal the keys, which appeared lonely and longing for touch. He swept a glance around the room and, satisfied that he was still alone, rested his wrinkled hands on the keys. He gently played an F major chord. Or at least tried to — the piano was so dreadfully out of tune that he could barely recognize the sound. Wincing, he tried a basic C major, the at-home position, but it was no use as a few of the keys stuck, a couple didn’t play at all; this piano didn’t simply need tuning, it needed to be fully restored. 

He kept tentatively playing the poor mistreated instrument, and started making mental notes of problems and possible fixes, until he heard someone clearing their throat behind him and jumped on the bench (as much as his newly frail body would allow). He turned round, half-expecting, even hoping, to see the stranger from the night before, but instead it was a ginger-haired man wearing neck tattoos and a quizzical look.

“I’m sorry, I was looking for someone, and the door was open, and the piano—” Patrick stopped, realizing he wasn’t making any sense. It wasn’t his fault — it was that the day, _his life_ , that didn’t make any sense anymore, and he tried changing course, explaining this to Neck Tattoo Guy — to talk about the curse, and tell him that he was actually twenty-two and not eighty, but the words escaped him. They were on the tip of his tongue, yet he couldn’t articulate them or get them out. Trying to convey that he couldn’t speak, he gestured helplessly to his own mouth, which remained stubbornly clamped shut. 

“Oh, it’s okay. If the house let you in, you’re supposed to be. But I think…” Neck Tattoo Guy squinted, then a barely-there smile turned up his lips. “Oh! You’re the piano tuner, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I mean, kind of,” Patrick said, extremely relieved to have the ability to produce speech once again though, apparently, age hadn’t made him much more eloquent. 

“Pete’s been looking for you everywhere. I’ll get him. Can you wait here, uhm…”

“Patrick, just Patrick is fine.”

“I’m Andy.” Neck Tattoo Guy — Andy — nodded and left the room, his voice ringing out from the hallway right after: “Pete! Patrick’s here.”

“Who?” asked another voice, and after a moment Andy came back into the room, trailed by the stranger from the night before, still wearing black, the overlarge, swooping hood of his jacket shadowing the bottom of his face, cut only by the asymmetrical zipper slithering across the front of his body like a thin silver snake, but his amber eyes were unmistakable as they looked at Patrick, and then blinked. “ _Oh_. There you are.” 

  
  



	4. Which is far too full of (broken) musical instruments

Perhaps he was deluding himself, but Pete thought he’d have recognized the boy under almost any disguise — he’d been expecting a metamorphosis curse, or an invisibility charm, yet here he was, cloaked only by an aging spell that did nothing to hide his blue and green and golden eyes, which had enchanted Pete the night before and were just as gorgeous in the light of day. 

“Patrick,” he said, already loving the way the name felt on his lips. 

“Do you… recognize me?” Patrick asked softly, narrowing his eyes. 

“Of course, and I know you’re under a spell,” Pete said immediately. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to get you involved.”

“You’re… a wizard,” Patrick said, still in that subdued tone, so different from the wry, sarcastic attitude of the previous night. Pete nodded. “Was the man on the phone a wizard too?”

“Something like that.” Perez wasn’t, not really, since he had no blood magic and borrowed or stole what he needed from other people. “He cursed you _over the phone_? That asshole.”

“Yes, he called right after you left, and asked— he wanted—” Patrick seemed to lose steam, then; his shoulders sagged down and he dropped on the piano bench, curling onto himself like someone had cut his strings. 

Pete rushed to his side and kneeled on the rug. “Are you alright?”

“I don’t know,” Patrick said, touching his forehead, “I think I’m starting to crack.”

“Yeah,” Pete couldn’t help from agreeing. “But it’s okay. You were looking a bit _too_ calm. Andy?” he called back. “Can you bring us some water? Or maybe— something stronger?”

“Water is fine,” Patrick said, hurriedly. “Listen— can you take off the spell?”

“Hmm, let me see.” Pete was still on his knees on the rug; he got up and sat on the bench next to Patrick, raising one hand toward his face, palm-up, as if to try and pet a distrustful cat. “May I?”

Patrick nodded, so Pete cupped his jaw with his hand, searching for the spell under the noise of Patrick’s blood rushing in his veins. He found it, hiding under the rhythm of his pulse, and then — once he knew it was there, he could see it — a bright, slightly cloudy silvery halo enveloping Patrick. He couldn’t _quite_ see Patrick’s younger face under the glamor, but there was a sense of something more real, more solid under the shimmering surface. He removed his hand, leaning back, and shivered.

“It’s strong,” he told Patrick. He didn’t want to scare him but all the same he realized he couldn’t bear to lie to him. “It’s also kind of — botched together. Like he used something that already existed and turned it round into a curse. Which makes it harder to undo.”

“How long will that take?” Patrick asked, apprehensive. 

“It may take a while. I’ll have to study it, find out what kind of magic he used, make sure that removing the spell won’t hurt you...” 

Andy came back, carrying a small tray with a bottle of San Pellegrino and two glasses. He set it down on a side table, and then said, “I’m not actually your butler, you know,” pointedly before leaving again.

“Yeah, I know, whatever,” Pete replied, waving him off — that was a long-running inside joke between him and Andy, and he hoped Patrick wouldn’t think he was a total asshole. In an effort to prove he wasn’t, he twisted off the San Pellegrino’s cap and poured Patrick a glass, nudging it towards him insistently; perhaps it wasn’t filled with any soothing potion, but surely it would help him feel better.

Patrick drank and muttered over the lip of the glass, “I can’t go back to the shop like this. What am I going to tell people? Oh, god — what am I going to tell Joe when he comes back?”

“Your… boyfriend?” Pete ventured.

Patrick actually burst out laughing, emphatically shaking his head and looking twenty years younger. Pete didn’t know whether he was happier about Patrick laughing and looking temporarily more like himself, or about the idea of this Joe as his boyfriend being so ludicrous. Eventually, Patrick sobered up, choking out, “My _brother_. But he won’t be back for two more weeks, anyway.” 

“You can stay here,” Pete said, in any case, because — well, because it might take longer, for one, and offering Patrick a place to stay seemed like the bare minimum he could do to start redeeming himself for getting him cursed, but also, he had to admit, surprising even himself, because he wanted to keep Patrick close. Safe. “You _should_ stay here,” he amended, “I can study the curse, and you can—”

“Fix your piano?” Patrick suggested, with a small smile that lit his face, and half the room, and Pete’s chest right where he felt a permanent, burning cold. It would be kind of nice to wake up to that smile every morning, Pete thought dreamily. 

  
  


It wasn’t quite morning when Pete stumbled into the study a few days later, a long, open coat draped around his shoulders as if to stave off a chill, but really, he just liked the way the collar turned up over the back of his neck — once he’d seen it in the mirror, he couldn’t bear to let it go; it hid his hair, which he couldn’t stand and had spent far too long staring at above his darkly heavy, odd eyes and the lines growing at the corner of his mouth that he couldn’t seem to will away. He’d crumpled his hair up even worse with a fist to the back of his head and left it like that, intentional bedhead, so that he could glide downstairs under the illusion that he _hadn’t_ been up, sleepless, for hours (as the night before, sleep had whisked away from him, coldly and briskly out of reach, like seeing the shadow of it rounding a street corner and no matter how hard he’d tried to catch up, pounding against the pavement, it disappeared around the bend, per usual; it had left him lingering in his bed, useless and boredly monotonous as a shelved wound-up child’s toy) — it was closer to two in the afternoon, but anyway, though his hair had escaped him, he’d gone through the trouble of re-discovering his finest silk shirt from the depths of his wardrobe, and a pair of black skinny jeans that fit snugly from his waist down, and boots that made him feel several inches taller (rather than just a few), and he’d thought he was ready, a mug of fresh, steaming coffee materializing from thin air into his hands as he opened the study doors.

As it turned out, even armed with coffee and the passage of time, he was still hardly ready for the sight of Patrick, kneeling in the center of the room, performing open heart surgery on a spare violin that Pete forgot he owned, awash in the sunlight where the dark green velvet curtains had been drawn open — something Andy must’ve done for him — and his face as freshly youthful as it was in Pete’s memory, unmarred by old age. It wasn’t until Pete heard the low, whispering notes of _There Is a Light That Never Goes Out_ beneath Patrick’s breath that he could make sense of it all. So it was singing, as well as laughing, that made the spell unstable.

His chest felt disconcertingly tight, as if something was fluttering inside of it, and a wave of dizziness rippled over him. He slouched into the threshold and subtly relied on it to steady him, and then, feeling like he needed to break an altogether different kind of spell, he said, faking nonchalance: “Where did you even find that?” 

Patrick startled, abruptly cutting off his singing and instantly transforming his body, as if he hadn’t heard anything — not Pete coming down the stairs nor his clicking footsteps through the hall nor the door creaking open. “What?” Patrick said, looking over, his face once again wrinkled and so very pale. He hurriedly pushed his glasses up his nose. There was a smear of what looked like ink on his cheek. “You must’ve had this for years,” he said, turning the violin over in his hands nearly guiltily, as if trying to hide or protect it. “I found her in the closet; such a shame to tuck something like this away.” 

Pete shrugged and it worked to fold his coat over his shoulders more firmly, concealing him further. “You know,” he gestured loosely at the instrument. “There’s so much clutter around here. Never know what will pop up.” He moved into the room to get a better look — but under Patrick’s steady gaze, he instead turned to inspect a closed-in writing desk shoved into the nearest corner. It was trussed up, painfully tied together like a ballerina’s foot bound into an arch. “You’re not bored yet, are you?” He asked, moving his fingers over the wood; they came away dusty and grimy. 

“Bored?” Pete heard Patrick say from behind him. “Are you _kidding_?” His voice broke with excitement. “I don’t know that I’ll ever get through all the odds and ends you’ve collected here.” 

“Hmm,” Pete said, thoughtfully, looking closely at his fingers, rubbing them together to rid them of the dirt. Maybe that _could_ be the case, if — he turned, and Patrick was looking down at the violin again, his wrinkled hands moving as swiftly and deftly over the strings as they had when Pete first fell into Patrick’s quaint shop all those days ago. And he seemed perfectly happy to continue ignoring Pete, with the spare parts and instruments and open toolbox surrounding him. “I’ll get you some tea, then,” Pete tried, bemused by the silence. 

“Hmm?” Patrick said, distractedly; he was busy searching for something over the patterned rug; Pete had the impulse to draw it to him, spare him the hunt, but he resisted, watching. “Sure, yes,” Patrick finally answered, finding at last whatever oddly tiny wrench he was looking for, and glanced up, offering a bright, all-too-fleeting smile. Even with him like that, it lit his face far more intensely than the sun had done. 

Pete twisted on his heel and fled to the kitchen, his coat flaring out behind him. 

  
  


“Calcifer,” Pete said desperately, upon arriving into the kitchen. “We need tea. Also, does eBay still exist?” It had been a while since Pete purchased something directly himself — and while, on occasion, he online-shopped in the early dawn hours from the comfort of his bed, it was usually on Hbx or Net-a-Porter or Etsy (which was still the best source for spell ingredients). 

The kitchen remained silent — Calcifer was ignoring him, or otherwise occupied — so Pete waved the lights on, though nothing appeared, and burst through to the dining hall, trying again, “Calcifer?”

Who finally flared to life on the sleeping screen of Pete’s laptop sitting upon an otherwise vacant table. “At your service,” came the crackling voice, sardonic, but his eyes looked out of the digital orange flame, wide and attentive. 

“Why would an aging curse flicker out when the sufferer sang or laughed?” Pete said, taking the nearest seat, though he was distracted by a glimmer through the enormous bay window that caught him in the eyes from where the shades were strung open; outside, the sprawling pool was absolutely still, its water untouched and an odd shade of sea-green, like something kept in a bottle; he hadn’t noticed it before, but the water didn’t stir in the breeze, frozen like the top of a lake in winter. 

“Hmm,” the fire said. “Might be dependent on attention. Control. When you mortals sing or laugh…”

“... We forget ourselves. Right.” Pete twisted to face Calcifer, as it were, and pulled his collar tighter to his neck again, eager to feel the press of it and return to the present moment. “It’s almost like... there is something inside him that’s already fighting off the curse.” 

“That’s a good hypothesis. You should look into it. What was it about eBay?” Calcifer asked, its eyes rolling a bit as the flame danced. “ _Another_ new project?” 

“No,” Pete said, impatiently. “Nevermind, I’ll handle it myself.” He glanced back to the water; it remained motionless, though the palm trees in the distance fluttered, fussing. Rising from the chair, Pete said, “Tell Andy we’ll take tea in the study?” 

“What’re you all done up for anyway?” Calcifer shouted at his retreating back, ignoring the request entirely.

Pete said, “I always dress like this,” but he’d already crossed the threshold to the foyer, and spoke to the dead air instead. 

There, he hesitated, caught staring at the single door across from him with its diamond-shaped knob that would allow him to disappear — _green_ , and the portal would spit him back out through his other shop door into a distractedly busy, congested part of Downtown, unlike the rest of L.A. — with shops on every corner and patrons milling up and down the concrete and the bookstore at the center of the bustle that he loved dearly. But at the sound of a clattering in the distance, he tore his gaze away, remembering at once the task he was in the middle of completing: carefully typing _used instruments_ into the eBay search bar on his phone.

  
  


The first packages arrived discreetly enough — Pete luckily received the notifications directly to his phone, with picture proof and sometimes an off comment about how his place was hard to find — and Pete successfully masked his delight at the flute he’d been assured was “beyond repair” and the third-hand trumpet, which Patrick inspected familiarly and closely before determining that it would take him weeks to bring it back to life. 

“Oh?” Pete had said casually, nonchalantly lifting an eyebrow. “Is it even worth it?” 

“Of course,” Patrick had answered immediately, his fingers touching the fine brass gently, almost reverently. “Broken pieces are always _worth_ it. It has nothing to do with worth, Pete — I know it’s hard to see the value now, but trust me, this can really sing.” 

Pete, oddly, felt his eyes prickling, as if a stray speck of dust suddenly got caught in them, so he’d asked Patrick if he’d needed any further accommodation to his room and then retreated once again to the library. 

Several more packages came in a flurry, leaving Patrick plenty of work — even as the study started to take some shape: a spot organized on the wall with proper hangers for guitars and basses, a string section forming, the grand piano awaiting its missing parts, and finally a sheet music stand blank and empty but constructed, awaiting its conductor — and letting Pete forget about the party, at least until Andy reminded him. 

“And I already said I’d host it? This Saturday or next?” He asked from where his head was under his massive bathroom sink faucet. He was working the deep conditioning potion out of his hair, but couldn’t convince himself to step into the shower. 

“Next,” Andy said quietly — more-so than usual. “You know, I would tell you we could get out of it or something, but.” 

“But?” Pete prompted. His neck ached from being held upside down; if he could bear it a bit longer... there was a stubborn clump of overly silky hair at the base of his skull he might just massage free. 

“But,” Andy repeated, “it was a request from Perez.” 

“Oh,” said Pete. He gave up on his hair. He reached up to shut off the water, and threw his head back; his hair splattered wetly onto his skin, hanging in his eyes and smelling heavily of the rosemary, lavender, and honey in the potion. He didn’t bother to push it away. 

He let it dry like that, blocking his vision like a semi-sheer, swaying, curling curtain all through pouring drinks in his lonely kitchen and hearing the party details and staring out the window, and now, as he wandered the hallways. Most of the lights had been set to dim so late into the night, and as he climbed the stairs, it made the sleek wood banister glow, appearing far warmer than he knew it was to the touch. He drew his oversized hoodie more tightly to himself, frowning, wishing he could reach out and for once be burned rather than stung cold. Maybe he’d had a bit too much to drink, he thought, feeling along the wall, turning his glare onto the framed art hanging above that had been gifted from his friends — if he could even call them that. 

Abruptly, the hall stopped and left him outside the last bedroom all alone at the quarter — of course, _Patrick’s_ room. 

It was only a gentle push to get the door unlocked and ajar, just a nudge, if anything, Pete thought, and it opened to him as if he was coaxing it personally with his hands. He slipped through the crack inside.

Patrick was as undisturbed as the sea-green pool water had been: lying still in the ornate, enormous bed-frame, the dark sheets contrasting sharply with his pale skin and the shine from the moon illuminating him. He was just as Pete remembered him asleep like this, like when he sang thoughtlessly — like this, Patrick’s kind, glassesless face was transformed again into its smooth and youthful state, relaxed, rather than how he got when he worked — how he’d been in the study earlier with his eyebrows tensely pinched and concentrated. His mouth was slack, open, but his breathing was as soft as a baby’s. 

Pete caught his hand before he made contact — startled by his finger a hair’s breadth from Patrick’s cheek, about to trace the smudge of ink from days ago that stubbornly remained on Patrick’s skin, as if partially tattooed on. Suddenly, he wished he could pull it from Patrick and trace it onto the wall instead, mark it there permanently, a kept shadow of Patrick, and Pete felt his eyes go hot again, wet and blurry, and he furiously wiped his hair from his face in a flush, chasing the feeling away. 

Patrick wouldn’t turn and look at him now, anyway — and how could Pete possibly expect him to, now that he was finally at peace. 

  
  



	5. In which there is a great deal of gossip

Patrick had come to learn many things about Pete, considering he’d only been staying in the house for a fortnight. Many of these things originated from direct observation — Patrick had indeed a host of opportunities to observe, as Pete was constantly hovering around him, always apologizing for disrupting Patrick’s work but never actually staying away. A few days into Patrick’s stay, he’d helped Andy lift the dust covers up from that couch, and the twin armchairs, revealing the rich brown leather upholstery underneath — Pete had marveled at that when he’d seen, as if he didn’t even remember what his own furniture looked like, and immediately chosen the couch as his workspace. After that, Pete had started to join him in the study every afternoon, carrying down heavy books from the library that he’d leaf through as if searching for clues, muttering to himself and writing feverishly, in bouts, into a purple notebook, spreading parchments and weird amulets over the cleared-out mirrored coffee table. Studying magic, Patrick supposed, even his own curse probably. Not that Patrick minded the company — he had the mornings to himself, and anyway, he thought, Pete couldn’t possibly know just how much of a distraction he really was. 

One day, after Pete had been looking out of the French windows for a few minutes, apparently taking a break from the furious scribbling he’d been doing until then, Patrick stood up from the desk he had commandeered as his work table, ignoring the way his knees popped, and joined Pete on the couch. “What are you working on?” he asked.

“Your spell, of course,” Pete said, turning and looking straight at him with his incredible eyes — Patrick had been studying their color as thoroughly as Pete had been studying incantations, concluding that they weren’t really brown as much as copper and gold, the flame he’d glimpsed on first meeting Pete burning in their depths only on occasion. “What else?”

“What else?” Patrick repeated, unsure of how to take that announcement. Surely his curse was not that crucial, in the grand scheme of things. “Uhm, I thought you’d have other commitments.”

“Well, yeah,” Pete said, and reached out to take Patrick’s hand in his own, very slowly, as if to give him time to stop the motion if he wanted to. “But you’re my priority. I got you involved, and I’m going to do everything in my power to get you out. I’m sorry if I haven’t been exactly… forthcoming about this, Patrick. It’s just, as a general rule, the less you know about magic, the better. But rest assured, I am going to solve this even if it kills me.”

“Oh,” was all Patrick could manage to say — overwhelmed by Pete’s words and the contact with his skin, which was as hot as freshly baked bread, just like every time they’d touched. “I mean — thank you.”

“Least I could do,” Pete said, and directed at him one of the smiles Patrick had come to think of as his _real_ ones — nothing overdone, nothing contrived or stretched-thin about it. Those smiles were rare, as far as Patrick could tell, and that was probably for the best, since they always left him in quite a state. 

“Tea?” Pete asked, and squeezed Patrick’s hand one last time before letting go. Patrick wanted to lament the loss, somehow, perhaps whining like Calcifer when he begged for eggshells from the burner at breakfast.

“I never say no to tea,” he was finally able to reply. 

  
  


Surely, he reflected that night, Pete was oblivious of the effect he had on Patrick — otherwise, he wouldn’t be holding his hand like that, he wouldn’t be looking at him like that, he wouldn’t always wear such tight fucking t-shirts, or those open high-necked jackets that whispered tailored sin around his narrow hips, or — speaking of hips — those jeans. God almighty, the jeans. Patrick sincerely hoped his libido would mellow out rather more than this in his actual old age, because he didn’t remember ever being in such a state of constant longing, not even as a teenager who’d freshly accepted he was attracted to a healthy selection of his schoolmates, regardless of gender, and it was completely exhausting. Though, when he allowed himself to really be honest, he had to admit it probably didn’t have anything to do with anyone’s age and everything to do with a certain wizard and his hotness — literal and figurative. A hot wizard who’d told Patrick _he liked him more than David Bowie_ , on the first night they met — but that was before the curse, before Patrick became an old man and, perhaps, an interesting puzzle to solve. A friend, maybe? He’d never been in the habit of deluding himself, or pushing his luck. When the curse was finally lifted, and all the instruments restored, including that poor grand piano, he really didn’t see Pete keeping in touch. Especially since he was apparently some big-shot celebrity. 

Strangely enough, Patrick had learned this from the tabloids that appeared as if out of thin air every few days. No one in the household seemed to actually read them — they just remained there, scattered around the living room, attracting nothing but the occasional contemptuous glance from Pete, until Andy carried out one of his tidying sweeps, stacking them in a pile and whisking them away in his arms to be thrown out. Patrick was so curious at first that he couldn’t help leafing through the glossy pages, looking for clues — he’d seen the library at the very top of the house, and couldn’t imagine Pete reading that sort of sensationalist garbage; Andy was either managing the house in his scarily efficient way, hitting the gym, or playing some complicated MMORPG; and Calcifer — well, maybe it was Calcifer who liked the tabloids, maybe they were a delicacy for a fire demon. 

“Calcifer, what do you eat? You like eggshells, right?” Patrick asked one morning, while he was working on an old Gibson mandolin with an unfortunately warped neck. “Do you guys even have, like— stomachs? Lungs?”

Calcifer giggled, his crackling laugh coming from the ridiculously high-end speaker system that had appeared a few days before, after Patrick had grumbled distractedly about having to listen to music on his _phone_ in a _music_ _room_. “No, but calcium is delicious. Crunchy, and it doesn’t burn too easily. And some extra oxygen is fun, look!” Patrick saw the little flame burn brighter and higher for a moment, and smiled. 

“That’s nice, buddy. Oh, and what about hearts?” he said, having suddenly remembered first meeting Calcifer, and the creature asking curiously whether Patrick would mind having _his_ heart eaten. “Do fire demons have hearts?”

“Not usually,” said Calcifer, “but I do.”

“Oh really? Then you’re very special, aren’t you?” Patrick had learned very soon that, with the little demon, flattery would get him nearly everywhere, and sure enough, Calcifer puffed up self-importantly and flared blue-green for a second, then smiled at Patrick with his pointy flame teeth.

“Yes, I am,” he said.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” Patrick said, placating, and got back to work on the mandolin. And that was it for Patrick’s most likely explanation for the tabloids — it didn’t seem like poorly-laminated paper would meet Calcifer’s criteria for a satisfying snack. 

Finally, one day, he’d found an article about Pete in an issue of the _National Enquirer_ and realized that _Pete_ brought home the magazines, as some kind of personal press review — every single one mentioned him, be it a picture of him posing next to other beautiful, glittering people, more often than not a blonde, scarlet-lipped starlet, his arm draped loosely around her narrow waist, or a fleeting mention of his attendance at some event, his name bolded in a small column of perfunctory text about his latest rumored fling. 

Through the tabloids, Patrick gleaned that nobody seemed to know why Pete’s face was everywhere, another generic celebrity, except that it was objectively an attractive face, pleasing to look at — although Patrick secretly found Pete even more captivating when he’d catch him coming out of his bedroom in the early afternoon, sweatpants riding low on his hips, his t-shirt rumpled from sleep, and yesterday’s eyeliner smeared. The only thing Patrick trusted the tabloids to tell him about Pete was his affinity for partying — he didn’t give any credit to all the gossip about Pete’s dating life, especially when he’d never seen him bring home a girl. Or a boy, for that matter. 

But tonight, during the big party that Pete was hosting, Patrick supposed he would see Pete in his natural environment; while he’d been peeking behind the curtain all this time, he could see Pete at _work_. However, as far as preparation went, Pete was of no real use — busy, apparently, gazing out the window and fussing with his fringe, as if it needed more fussing. 

“It’s fine,” Patrick tried to tell him. “You look _fine_ ,” but Pete seemed dubious — apprehensive even while mulling over one beautifully decorated table with canapes and hors d’oeuvres and the next; the spread was varied, surprisingly colorful. Patrick had taste-tested one of the fruit tarts, and it was on the right side of semi-sweet, smooth and creamy without being heavy; he could’ve eaten the whole tray. Though Patrick had lied: Pete didn’t look fine — he looked improbably beautiful, more-so than the decorations and the catering, stealing the attention in a suit as sleek and fluid as ink, his eyes glittering black as obsidian under his carefully straightened hair, the glimpse of skin at his neck impossibly golden. 

As for Patrick, the only concession he’d made was borrowing a cashmere cardigan, a fine pair of brown leather Oxfords, and a sleeker, clear pair of glasses that had been charmed into providing the correct prescription, all from Pete, who had hardly let Patrick thank him for the trouble. Pete hadn’t said either way if Patrick was up to the unofficial dress-code, and in Patrick’s endeavor to not freak himself out, he’d stopped looking in the mirror altogether, so he wasn’t quite sure himself. In fact, each morning, he splashed his face with cold water to wake himself up and brushed his teeth while determinedly looking at the gleaming white subway tiles at the side of the sink rather than the mirror. He knew he was growing a beard, and did spare the occasional glance for the sake of its progress, but it was barely more than a white-blonde stubble and didn’t yet need to be groomed. He figured, if he avoided his own reflection, he could forget for significant stretches of time that he didn’t look like himself; the starkest reminder were always his hands, but they were really only at the front and center of his perception as he was working or playing one of the restored instruments, and thus half-distracted from his own predicament anyway. 

He couldn’t always escape it, of course — showers were a fraught affair, though he’d never been particularly fond of his own body, even before; and he’d had to dwell on the reality of his curse while responding to the few texts Joe was able to send him from Barcelona or London or Berlin, trying to find a way to warn his brother of the strangeness he would find upon his return without breaking the terms of the sort of non-disclosure agreement built into the spell. He did try to type an actual explanation only to find, on rereading, that it was gibberish, or a string of random emojis. In the end he was able to write: _Do you remember grandma’s stories? It turns out they were real_. 

Joe had replied, _I might have some idea about that. I’ve been telling you, the music scene is INTERESTING_ , but there was no further communication until a few days before the party, when Joe had texted him to say he’d landed safely in Los Angeles, thankfully, after his long flight home from overseas. Hopefully, Patrick would be able to put off a visit until Pete had cracked the curse.

Seeing how the house had nearly transformed itself — the only one to actually prepare for the party — Patrick briefly worried over his meager attempt at dressing up and disguising his age. Curtains had drawn back from the windows and straightened up, fairy lights appeared on the deck overlooking the sprawling pool, all the sleek wood and metallic surfaces were shiny and dust-free. The multi-colored diamond-shaped knob on the hallway door wouldn’t budge, though — made clear, somehow, by the way Pete had turned it to _red_ , which opened on the formal front door of the house in Beverly Hills, and pressed the flat of his palm against it, firmly, as if to say _STAY_. The teleportation door, as Patrick called it in his head, wouldn’t be opening tonight either on _blue_ — the jewelry store — and certainly not on _green_ — the small used bookstore that Pete briefly visited every few days. Patrick had peeked inside once, curious as to what could possibly be in that place that would ease some of the tension from Pete’s posture after his visits, but had found nothing except for dusty spines and dead silence. Which was probably the point. (It was still a complete mystery where _black_ might transport him.) 

The living room did budge: appearing wider, more open, while it was harder to find the staircase leading to the bedroom quarters, as if it tucked politely away, and the study was all but closed up; Patrick felt he had to coax the doorway from the walls with his hands pressed flat to them, as if promising fidelity or taking an oath, and only when the house seemed to recognize him did he find his study. All for the best, he figured, given the array of industry celebrities that would be arriving soon. 

While he might be able to engage in music shop talk with just about anyone at any given time, he didn’t exactly wish to share these works-in-progress. He’d come to know each instrument in the room now; there wasn’t one he hadn’t touched, and though he was awaiting the grand piano’s missing parts — the shipment somehow delayed _again_ — he wasn’t in a rush to work through the rest of them anyway; they were now as intimately familiar as the inside of his own shop.

“Oh, Patrick,” Pete said, interrupting his thoughts. He caught Patrick while rounding one of the dessert tables, likely rechecking details that had already been sorted, and looked up abruptly, nearly running into him, as if lost in thoughts of his own; there was a flash of something over his face, sharp in his eyes, there then gone. He cleared his throat. “Are you — staying around?” 

“Was planning on it,” Patrick said, then frowned. Perhaps he’d been presumptuous in assuming that when Pete had loaned him clothes, it served as an invitation. Perhaps his doubts were right, and he wasn’t quite up to snuff. “Unless, of course —” It was Pete’s house after all; the tart from earlier twisted in his stomach, suddenly a sickly sweet. 

“No!” Pete said, too loud, and then more normally, “No, no, please, of course you’re welcome. I’m glad the shoes fit,” as if everything Patrick wore in this house didn’t already magically stretch or shrink to fit, as he suspected Pete had designed it. Pete touched his fringe again, as if it would fit correctly, too, if he moved it enough. 

Patrick reached up without thinking, pulling Pete’s hand away from his hair in an effort to rescue it — finding Pete’s palm unexpectedly warm to the touch. “Leave it be.”

“Easier said than done,” Pete muttered. He tugged his hand free as if it were a slippery fish avoiding getting baited and hooked. “Well, anyway, _people_ should be coming by.” He flung his hand out in a gesture, encompassing the bar across from them and the neat little row of shot-glasses that must’ve lined themselves up while Patrick wasn’t looking, the stainless steel martini shaker that appeared at one end, as if to say _get ready_. “It’ll hardly be this quiet soon. I’d apologize for all the noise, but,” his smile tightened, strained, his eyes flashing. “What else would you expect.”

“You must be... excited,” Patrick said, and then winced, feeling like he’d thrown a dart in the dark and entirely missed the target; Pete’s expression didn’t shift. Patrick tried again: “Lots of people coming, huh?”

“Just a few of my closest friends,” Pete said, but it was dry, sardonic, and Patrick felt he missed the mark all over again. “Try not to hold it against me?” Pete said, giving him one last, flickering look, and then he clapped his hand over Patrick’s shoulder for a single, stingingly hot moment, avoided his gaze, and excused himself.

  
  


A few of Pete’s closest friends turned out to be quite the number of guests. Patrick had difficulty keeping track between the seemingly endless swing of shirts and dresses and shiny shoes entering through the door — after it was fashionably late to do so, at least; the first few guests had appeared embarrassed, laughing nervously when they realized the house was near empty, but once the flood started, it didn’t stop; some of them, arriving in small groups of two or three and sticking together, seemed to be dressed for a ceremony more than a party, more formal than glamorous, almost like they’d borrowed their clothes from another era, or taken them out of dusty trunks in locked-away attics; and some guests made bigger announcements of their appearance than others.

One man in particular arrived amid the flutter of guests, bursting from the center of the commotion and popping into the room in an explosion of (figurative) confetti and sparklers and streamers; if that didn’t scream for attention, his oddly cropped, violently bright blazer surely did, paired with the neon gloves and fuchsia corduroy trousers. Patrick felt strangely perturbed by — whatever that display was, and turned away and to fortify himself with a drink, wishing to wash the taste of it away.

He hid in an alcove for a more subdued chance at people-watching; halfway through his first drink, someone entered in a far less dramatic flare that looked starkly familiar. Patrick squinted through his glasses, wondering if his eyesight was playing tricks again, but no, that was _Joe_ , clear as day, as if he’d just stepped off the private jet owned by the metal band he’d been touring with; his hair was done-up and styled in that way that looked affected and messy, his bright, blue eyes filled with their familiar spark. 

Patrick swallowed his drink and steeled himself, and then reached out to snag Joe by the sleeve as he passed by, whispering, “Fancy seeing you in a place like this.” 

“Patrick?” Joe said, near a whisper in return. And then: “Patrick!” sounding much more enthused. 

Patrick couldn’t help from brightening at the recognition, relief enveloping him. “How did you _know_?”

“I’d recognize you anywhere, you know that,” Joe said, drawing Patrick into a full-bodied hug, as if he’d truly missed him. “Besides,” he said into Patrick’s ear, “your voice is a dead giveaway. Still sounds just like you.”

Patrick wasn’t sure he agreed, but he gripped Joe tight in return, prepared to suffer the consequences — creaking joints and aching bones and all — but they never came, and he just enjoyed it, only feeling slighter than usual in his brother's arms. 

“What in the hell happened?” Joe said, suddenly pulling back, slapping Patrick lightly on the shoulder. His eyes beamed in a cross between relief and fury. “Did you finally manage to piss off the wrong person with that temper of yours? You have to tell me everything,” he insisted, though Patrick wasn’t sure how much the curse would even let him say, even should they find the time for it all now, or the privacy.

As if in reminder, a woman in teetering heels and a lacy dress slipped around them, her long, sharp nails glittering in the light like the flash of a mermaid’s tail underwater while she trailed some poor, unsuspecting youth behind her by the shoestring tie at their neck. 

Patrick and Joe traded a look, and then burst out laughing simultaneously. Patrick shook his head, and decided on: “It’s a long story,” finding once again that he was unable to reveal the truth of the curse and unsure where to begin, anyway. “But I’m staying here for the time being. Pete has been trying to fix—” he gestured at his own face, hoping that would be clear enough, “— _this_ , and I’ve been very well taken care of, honestly.” 

“ _Pete_ , huh? Don’t spare the details. Oh, man, if grandma knew how you went and got involved with a wizard, of all people...” Joe said, raising an eyebrow.

“Who said anything about being _involved_ with anyone,” Patrick huffed, feeling himself flush. “He’s a perfect gentleman, plus I’ve been working here, you know, he has this piano that— oh! That reminds me. How’s the shop? How’re _you_?”

“Right, _sorry_ , of course you’re not _involved_ , but I’m fine, the shop is fine,” Joe said, looking a bit amused, letting Patrick get away with the change in subject. He smoothed down the front of his sweater. “Not the same without you, but all fine.” 

Patrick nearly began to ask about his favorite Fender and whether Ms Ainsworth, a long-time customer who’d been a soloist for forty out of her fifty years of life, had picked up her violin yet, but thought better of it when Joe’s eyes slid away from him, over his shoulder. “Don’t let me interrupt.” 

“You’re not,” Joe said, and even shot him a charming if distant smile; his eyes were clearly taken elsewhere — to whatever lay beyond Patrick and into the open living room turned shark-tank — shining brightly above the oversized cowl neck of his sweater. 

“Who is it?” Patrick asked, without having to look. He took a sip of his drink to hide the smirk at Joe’s blanched expression, caught. “You’re staring.”

“Am not,” Joe tried. Then he deflated, blushing. “Okay, I am, but you can’t blame me — it’s _the_ Ashlee Simpson.” He nodded subtly towards the opposite end of the room. “You know her, right? The blonde, over there.” 

Patrick wasn’t sure he did, so he twisted a bit to look: the blonde in question had her hair slicked back, sharp, like her cutting cheekbones and collarbones revealed by the long neckline of her jumpsuit, its shimmery silk off-setting the harshness. Of course Joe was making eyes, but Patrick couldn’t recognize her for the life of him. 

He turned back round to shrug at Joe, who rolled his eyes and called him a lost cause, so Patrick rolled his eyes at him, and said, “Well, go on, then,” nudging Joe towards her and the center of the room, “ _network_.” He made a shooing motion when Joe hesitated, and then said more quietly: “Seriously, talking with an old man all night is not going to do you any favors.” 

“Oh, come on, you’re not an old man,” Joe said. “Don’t be so dramatic. You look about Ms Ainsworth’s age! In fact… perhaps you should give her a call, she’s always had a thing for you.”

Patrick scoffed at both those ridiculous notions, and was going to tell Joe that he should probably get his eyesight checked out, and also, like, his _brain_ — but Joe was already squeezing his arm, gently, and setting off, lost immediately in the rapture of someone’s billowing dress shirt and someone else’s obnoxiously tinkling laugh, which passed like a cloud in front of Patrick. 

With Joe gone, no one else would know or recognize him, and Patrick was truly alone — but at least like this, there was no pressure to be anyone in particular, no need to sell himself or his craft. Like this, Patrick was entirely off the hook. The party was in full swing, and none of the other guests seemed to share his reservations; from his post in the alcove, there didn’t seem to be an empty space in the house, and Patrick understood now why it had needed to enlarge itself, widen the living room — all just to accommodate the sheer volume of guests, chattering away and clinking glasses noisily, dining in bite-sizes from polite, petite cocktail napkins. Somehow the catering tables stayed ever-full, as did the liquor bottles at the bar. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick saw Pete cross the room, a long-stemmed wine glass now in one hand, his ever-present crescent necklace twinkling under the light even from afar, and one of those disarmingly charming smiles ready to serve, and Patrick turned, stepping out of the alcove, transfixed and curious, to track him. He met Ashlee by the open French doors leading to the pool and patio; they greeted each other like old friends. And Patrick only had time to think, surprised, that they must know each other, before he heard, like a snake slithering through blades of grass, the first whisper: “Oh, no, _entirely_ vapid. I mean, have you ever had a conversation with him? Please. Can’t follow a word, the poor dear.” 

“Really?” A second, hushed voice said. “Well, none of his art will sell, apparently. Not without someone’s name in the papers next to his, at least.” 

“Talentless,” the first voice agreed. “And a pity, with that pretty face. Did you go to his showing in New York? God.” It laughed, cruel. “So very _amateur_ , glorified graffiti, if you ask me.” 

“Wait,” a third voice put in. “I thought he had that clothing line.” 

“Is that still happening? Well, who can keep up, all these ridiculous vanity projects….” the first voice trailed off. “Not that you’d want to, except to hear who he’s fucking now. Did you know he hooked up with Michelle Trachtenberg, and she had to break it off with _him_?” 

There was an appropriately shocked gasp, and another hushed _No_ quickly followed by _Tell me_.

Suddenly, it seemed to Patrick that Pete _wasn’t_ smiling charmingly at Ashlee, but instead, the way their heads were bent towards each other was more like a privacy curtain being drawn, a partition; that Pete was concealing an unhappy twist to his mouth, and Ashlee’s hand on his shoulder was consoling, rather than coy; the image of the two of them swathed in black turned sour to Patrick, as if they were dressed for a funeral rather than affecting an edgy, dramatic style. Once Patrick saw it, he couldn’t stop seeing it: Pete must’ve been fussing with his hair so much earlier in order to artfully conceal his eyes — to prevent anyone from staring into them, and seeing what Patrick could from all the way across the room: that they weren’t glowing with delight or pride, but vacant and heavy, a carved out space, the black and blue eyeshadow hollowing them out rather than distracting from their sleepless, dull pain, as was likely intended. 

Patrick swallowed thickly. He needed another drink immediately. He turned towards the bar, only to catch the tail-end of conversation between a pair, the both of them tall, their features oddly pointed. They hissed to each other: 

“Powerful? Well, sure,” said one man with a frilled, high collar that masked the side of his face and left bare a cheekbone sharp enough to cut glass with, twisting his lips in distaste. “But anyone can be powerful with an indentured fire demon.”

“A fire demon?” the other man, draped loosely in a dark cloak that seemed on the verge of floating away from him like a smoke cloud, replied. “I thought that was just a rumor! Where did he even _find_ one?”

“Oh no, it’s true. I’ve _seen_ it. And I mean, there are _reasons_ why no one does that anymore… You can’t control those things, you know.”

“Right. By the way, since you say it’s true, I wonder—”

“Hmm?” 

“What did the demon get in exchange? I mean…” 

“Oh my god, right? What could _he_ possibly have that was of any value?” 

Cloak caught Patrick staring then and shrugged unabashed at him, which dragged Cheekbones’ attention over, who laughed uproariously, and then said, sneeringly, “Oh, a half-blood, _really_? I can’t wait to hear how _you_ know him.” 

Something was ballooning in Patrick’s chest, swelling quickly and uncomfortably tight, making his cheeks burn; it was taking a hideous, monstrous shape that was going to burst wide open and roar. The gall of these people, he thought; he didn’t care what they said about him, but to say all _that_ openly in Pete’s home, of all places. It was one thing to sell it to a cheap tabloid, where it may’ve been the expected cost of celebrity, and another entirely to say it just as Pete had turned his back right in front of their faces. 

Patrick furiously downed the last of his glass to abade the thing in his chest, but it was no use, fanning the flames like hot fuel — it was going to grow limbs and teeth, ready to snap and bite, as if the magic in the house had gone to live in his chest instead, turned coldly mean and dark. To spare himself and everyone else, he twisted away and waded through the living room, the sleeve of his cardigan snagging on a woman’s spiky bracelet as if it were the thorns of a thick forest, until he struggled free and fled to the emptied hallway. 

He fell against the wall there to catch his breath, his head reeling, and was briefly surprised by the doorway that appeared upon his touch, remembering at once his sacred study, and never felt more grateful for how it opened only to him, sealing off the noise of the party once he shut himself inside. 

He huffed a _thank you_ into the quiet room, though his thoughts didn’t lessen their haste any. He couldn’t help from thinking that _he_ knew who Pete was, even if _they_ , out there, didn’t — even if they pretended to, as if Pete was an item to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, only after dissecting him down to his barest parts — but Patrick had discovered, not only through his observation, but through the entire collection of instruments kept in the room, who Pete truly was; this room told Patrick more than Pete could ever mean to reveal. 

No opportunistic, self-absorbed narcissus could possibly own such a playfully, purely joyful thing like an otamatone, Patrick thought, touching the rounded curve of it, the little design on the front like a face: big eyes, the line through it like a smiling mouth; he greeted it with the barest smile of his own, though he didn’t wish to disturb it, and instead admired it once more, knowing the odd, musical sound it could make when correctly played. Something like this, it was adored and treasured for simply the _sake_ of it, meant for someone who appreciated art simply for the sake of it, like he did. Like Pete did.

He left it upon the shelf, turned to take in the rest of the room, surrounded now by his truly closest friends, and sighed, running his hand over his hair. How lonely it had been, in that sea of glittering bodies. How lonely Pete must’ve felt in the crowded room. 

He felt dizzy at the thought of it, and leaning back against the shelf, he was surprised when his elbow bumped into something hard — a book or journal, knocking it clean off and scattering it onto the floor. He muttered to himself about his own clumsiness, setting his glass down on an end table to retrieve the text. The cover was a plush black leather, expensive, like a one-of-a-kind, customized moleskine, and Patrick found himself turning it over if only to feel it out further. The front of it was plain except for golden, engraved initials: P.L.K.W. III. 

He’d thought by now there wasn’t one item he didn’t yet know in the room, no stone unturned, so he found himself thumbing it open, the parchment thick between his fingers. The middle of a page opened itself to him:

      
_welcome to the demolition derby that is my heart, yeah sorry i just let my love loose again. i place my bets on stars that are probably already burned out._  


      
_i wait for my dreams to break on the sand — i have chemicals to erase my old troubles and welcome new ones with open arms, finding the right formulas, adding and subtracting myself from myself — haven't slept in days. think i am starting to crack._  


      
_a century of this. cursing leap years ‘cause without them i’ll be done sooner._  


      
_my moods shape shift, when i look up at the sky i want to eat the stars. and i only want to make you as lonely as me (so you can get addicted to this). the truth about loneliness is you're only as good as the company you keep._  


      
_i got starlight in my veins, forget your nighttimes — i just want to come back to life, spark my crazy head to keep you warm at night._  


Patrick’s mouth nearly trembled at reading it, and so did his stomach, clenching; he wasn’t sure if he needed another drink to quell it or if he was going to be ill. But he held the book all the more tightly, cradling it, as if careful not to spill its contents, while he tried to figure it out. He flipped the page, searching:

      
_toast to no-one, who cares:_  


      
_i’m just a carefully constructed collage of magazine articles and flashy pictures. you see, i’m boring but overcompensate with headlines and flash photography._  


      
_fuck your life under the microscope. fuck your conclusions. they never got me anywhere but here. over and over again. every single time._  


      
_i pray for something to crash into me and smash me back to something more simple. i wish for disaster so i can be razed. i’m telling you if i could do any of it again, i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t._  


      
_do you ever get the feeling that your insides and outsides don’t really go together? hot to the touch/cold on the inside. i’m best when i’m making things worse. i am (not) real. the only thing i am sure of is — however you think of me is wrong._  


      
_and the universe doesn’t care about luck or headlines. someone whispered “make yourself” in my ear once. steal me away from all of this._  


      
_make yourself._  


Patrick was sure his hands were shaking now too; the heat was back with a horrible, flooding vengeance, as if he’d downed several more shots. The hissing whispers replayed in his mind, calling Pete empty-headed and talentless and self-absorbed, those words that had been slung at him like mud.

Patrick clamped the book shut, right as the door slammed open. 

“Oh,” Pete said, standing at the threshold. His collar was wrecked, as if he tore it away from his throat, his necklace revealed on his chest, twinkling. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” Patrick echoed, clenching his fist. He had to swallow his first thoughts, and then shook his head, watching as Pete carefully shut the door and the lingering noise of the party drifted away again, drowned out. Of course the house had let him into the room; it was _his_ house after all.

“Pete,” Patrick started, and then had to stop abruptly when Pete turned to look, his hollowed eyes went stony, shut like a curtain had closed over them, keeping Patrick out.

“I know,” Pete said, half a smile flitted across his mouth, but it was too sharp. “I’m sure everything you’ve heard is true.” 

Patrick nearly wanted to throw the book right at him. “What — you don’t have to put on an act with _me_ ,” he said. His chest was ballooning again, and he didn’t know what was going to come, unbidden, out of his mouth next. But he didn’t want to hurt the journal while he said it, so he set it down on the table gently next to his half-full glass, and found Pete’s eyes narrowing at him now, curious. “I know none of it’s true.”

Pete scoffed, and touched his hand over his hair carefully, looking away. “I don’t know what makes you so sure,” he said. 

So Patrick could hardly be blamed for bursting out with: “Look, I know I’m not anyone important, but I can see what you’re like. Those people don’t know the first thing about you.” That dragged Pete’s gaze back over to Patrick, who found himself breathing a bit heavily as he went on, spitting out, “You call those people your _friends_?” His eyes suddenly grew hot and he cut himself off, pressing the back of his wrist against his mouth to still himself. 

Pete was still cornered by the door, like a caged, wounded animal, but he came closer at that, nearly to the center of the room, and in the light, the way it gleamed off his face, his eyes were glowing, those embers returning, no longer coldly shut off. 

A thought broke over Patrick like an egg on top of his head, the yolk running down — maybe no one had ever said this to Pete before. No one had ever expressed out loud to Pete that he didn’t actually deserve it, that it wasn’t right. “If you think you don’t deserve better, I’ll —” Patrick said, lowering his arm from his face. He wasn’t sure what he would actually do, but the look running across Pete’s face made him want to try — to take a vow, the same way he’d promised the room to protect its sacred insides if it would just let him inside. 

“You’ll…?” Pete asked, and Patrick must’ve come closer too, because now Pete was right there, the open collar of his shirt and the chain of his necklace a hair’s breadth away, close enough that it wouldn’t be an effort for Patrick to reach out and curl his fingers in the silky folds. 

“I’ll make you see it,” Patrick answered, finally, his voice low but unwavering. Pete’s eyes were hot on his face, open and wide, the eyeshadow beneath seeming to enlarge them rather than sink them in, expanding them wholly like his pupils. 

“You can’t possibly mean that,” Pete said, but now he sounded like he didn’t believe himself. “You can’t possibly care this much.”

Half a smile cracked across Patrick’s mouth, and he nearly rolled his eyes, huffing around it. “Why not?” he said. “You can’t possibly think _that_ out there is all you are.” 

“I thought I wanted big dreams,” Pete said at last, muttering it slowly, as if discovering the words blindly, “but now I just want to be okay.” And then he fell forward, his hands coming up, as if — seeking Patrick with his plush, pouty, giving mouth, and Patrick felt his eyes flutter shut, felt himself lean in, too — felt the ghost heat of Pete’s lips, his fingers curling at Patrick’s jaw and neck. 

A shudder ran down Patrick’s spine, and he drew in a breath, forced himself away, breaking the contact. He retreated to the window, and touched his face with a shaky hand, fixing his glasses and his shirt, clearing his throat. “Sorry,” he croaked out, “I’m sorry.” 

“No, I am,” Pete said immediately. “I — shouldn’t have assumed, I just —“ 

“Please,” Patrick almost laughed. He couldn’t believe his life, sometimes: Pete apologizing for assuming about _him_ , imagine that. “I’m glad you assumed. I just can’t — not like _this_.” He braced himself, then turned to face Pete and gestured to himself. 

Pete glanced behind him to the end table. “You mean half drunk?” A smile flared up at the corner of his mouth. 

“Nice try,” Patrick said. “I mean like this.” He gestured specifically at his face this time. And it wasn’t that he was older, exactly, just that — “Borrowing someone else’s body or wearing their skin.” He shrugged. “It isn’t right.” 

“Of course you’d say that,” Pete said. “Of _course_ that’s the hang up.” But before Patrick could answer, Pete was stepping closer again rather than disappearing from the room, moving to touch Patrick’s face once more, trace his cheek delicately. Patrick tried not to let his eyes flutter closed at the touch. 

“So,” Pete murmured, “you’re saying, if I break this curse, _then_ you’ll kiss me?” 

Patrick flushed at just hearing the word; even though of course he knew from moments ago the sentiment was true, somehow aloud it sounded all the more real: Pete wanted to _kiss_ him. His head sloshed, too much to drink, perhaps. But what he actually managed to say was: “I might take that into consideration.” He lifted an eyebrow for the full effect. 

“Oh,” Pete said softly, but his grin turned sharper, his head cocking to the side with his eyes half-closed, like a cat clocking its prey. “Now it’s on.” 

  
  


Patrick woke up some time through mid-morning, surprised at his own self for sleeping so very late, shocked briefly by the pounding at his temples, and the nausea curling in his stomach. He pressed a hand to his head, registering the curtain fluttering noisily away from the window as if he’d just missed a gust of wind blowing in and the sun bright and hot beyond it, wondering if that was what finally woke him and how he’d made it to his bed at all. Each time he tried to grasp for the memory, it slipped through his fist like water. 

He groaned and rolled over in the sheets as if they would have the answer, and as he turned to face the pillow beside him, he found something on the satin case — a mark or stain. It looked like a bruise imprinted there, and Patrick reached to touch it carefully with one hand, frowning, unsure what mystical substance he might find, but it came away flaky, dry, difficult to rub away, and Patrick realized with shuddering clarity that it was the same shade as the makeup around Pete’s eyes, the same bruising and hollowing colors, except there was a harsh black streaking through the deep blue ombré like an inky river of tears. 

“Oh,” Patrick said without meaning to, touching the stain. It _was_ Pete, he realized, and the rest of the night came flooding back to him — their conversation in the study; Andy interrupting them to request Pete’s presence back at the party due to some “situation” with one of the guests; Pete insisting on escorting Patrick to his room and kissing him goodnight at the door — as chaste and restrained as he could, Patrick was sure, though if he closed his eyes, he could still feel the shape of Pete’s lips on his cheekbone, burning up. All of that could have very well been a fantasy, he thought, an extravagant dream brought on by an excess of magic, champagne, or both — but somehow, the stained pillowcase was enough to convince him that it was all quite real.


	6. In which there are full moon pills

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To err on the safe side: **warnings in this chapter for mental health issues, including an episode of depression and some (canonical) references to anti-anxiety/sleeping medication use.**

How many nights had ended that same way, with Pete drunk and miserable and roaming the changeable hallways of his own house, looking for something, someone, somewhere, nowhere? Far too many, truthfully, and he’d always end up in his own room, anyway, alone but for the relics and memories and shards of broken hourglass that filled it floor to ceiling, like an illustration for _horror vacui_ , packed to overflowing; his head a junkyard for rusted midnight thoughts. 

After the party finally ended; after the poor waiter who’d dared spill a glass of champagne on the high, frilled collar of Brendon’s coat had been rescued — and he’d have to order an enormous bunch of black roses, at the very least, and have it delivered to Ashlee’s house, because without her help, he might not have stopped that particular disaster in time; all guests magical and non-magical safely en route to their own homes or those of the next fools who would provide them with entertainment and refreshments in exchange for their glittering presence; secure in the knowledge that Andy would handle the clean-up and tip every catering employee the properly outrageous amount for their work and, hopefully, their discretion; after what had been, quite honestly, one of the longest evenings in recent memory, Pete finally turned up once again outside Patrick’s door. This had become a habit he just couldn’t quit; creepy, but harmless, at least Pete hoped, since by now he was addicted to that moment where he could gaze at Patrick’s sleeping form, the smoothness of his ivory skin, the slight flush on his cheekbones, and feel a fraction of that stillness wash over himself. Braced with that, he could finally force himself to go back to his own room, close his eyes, as if Patrick’s image still imprinted on the inside of his eyelids could shield him, act as an amulet against nightmares and despair, better than any protection spell he could work on. 

Tonight, Patrick had left his door open. It was perhaps that — or maybe the way earlier, in the study, he’d shut his eyes as if bracing for a kiss, right before moving away, looking like he’d wanted it almost too much, like he’d actually wanted Pete to — in any case, looking at him wasn’t enough for Pete, not tonight — half drunk still and greedy and aching, and utterly exhausted, he found himself walking over to the bed, where Patrick lay stretched out on his side like an open bracket, and silently, carefully, lowering himself down, facing him, curling up over the covers and closing the parentheses, laying his head on the soft, empty pillow. He could imagine, for a moment, what they would look like to someone coming into the room, Pete like an inkstain smudging a delicate watercolor painting — messy black hair, rumpled black clothes, black rings around his eyes over the now snow-white linens that were barely a contrast to Patrick’s fair complexion. Then his attention was caught by the rhythm of Patrick’s breathing, soft and so close, and as he tried to slow his own down to match, he fell asleep, suddenly and deeply, which hadn’t happened in years. 

  
  


_They’re standing in a wildflower meadow, next to a tranquil lake, so still and smooth that it looks like a photograph of the sky. Pete is on his knees, and presents Patrick with an ornate box — it looks just like the one in which Pete used to keep his mother’s letters — and a hopeful smile, a smile he hasn’t worn in ages, since before everything changed, a smile that goes to his eyes and warms him all over._

_Patrick smiles back, brilliant, disarming, his eyes looking just like stars, and takes the box — their fingers brushing, sparks flying — “There’s nothing here,” Patrick says, and he looks — horrified. Pete looks down and sees that his own chest is open, skin sliding aside like thick fabric, a hole where his heart should be, no blood, nothing, just a void in the shape of a heart._

  
  


Pete awoke — dark gray clouds, like oversized smoke rings, were gathering at the ceiling corners. He’d felt it coming, at the party, the drinks but a temporary relief, and hoped against hope that he was mistaken, that it was only the usual pre-entertaining anxiety, but of course, it just delayed the inevitable. He shouldn’t have drunk, and he shouldn’t have tried to kiss Patrick, and he shouldn’t have fallen asleep here, and he shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have —

He shouldn’t have promised Patrick to break his curse. It was deeper than he’d first imagined; rather than resorting to his usual parlor tricks, Perez had somehow managed to weave his stolen magic with something more real, binding the spell to Patrick in such a way that lifting it had become nearly impossible. It was a real mess of a curse, but that was, ironically, the very reason for its persistence.

Flashes of conversation from the party replayed in Pete’s mind as he grew more alert: Perez laughing at him, dressed in that ridiculous outfit — where had he even found _hot pink_ corduroy pants, not to mention the lurid flowers on his blazer that were straight out of a bad acid trip — as if to prove that he didn’t care about anyone’s opinion, but only managing to show how desperately he wanted everyone, or anyone, really, to talk about him in whichever way. 

“Where the fuck did you even find a curse like that?” Pete had hissed, after he’d finally cornered Perez next to the buffet, unable to stop himself, even while knowing it was a mistake, too revealing of how much he’d come to care for Patrick, a dangerous piece of information for Perez to have. 

But Perez had just laughed more outrageously, like Pete had made a joke — the very idea of caring about someone else as more than a means to an end, perhaps, utterly beyond his understanding. “I cashed in a favor, Pete, you know how it is. There are many people who owe me one. You should know,” he’d said, his tone sharpening, the humor dropping. “You’re one of them.” 

Suddenly, Pete had felt almost cold with fury at the way Perez was constantly flaunting his leverage over him, but he’d recovered from the burst of emotion with a long swig from his flute of champagne. “Fine. I learned my lesson, now take it off.”

“Oh, but I can’t! You know I’m not very good at all that... _stuff_ , sweetheart,” Perez had said, raising his voice and widening his eyes, playing the part of some naive character for a few seconds, probably for the benefit of whoever was standing close and trying to eavesdrop. But then he went on, in an undertone, getting too close and speaking almost into Pete’s ear: “And even if I could, I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss. It’s not like it was anyone important.”

Fortunately, they were interrupted by Ashlee, swooping in to air-kiss Perez on both cheeks and greet him with expertly-faked enthusiasm — Pete wasn’t confident he would have been able to avoid murmuring a little incantation into Perez’s violently pink cocktail, though it wouldn’t have been lethal. Probably. Another reason to be grateful to Ashlee, then: he really didn’t want a murder on his conscience. Not even Perez’s. 

“Ashlee! Delighted, as usual. You’re a vision!” Perez had shrieked back, guzzling the rest of his drink and slamming the glass on a nearby table. “Isn’t she a vision, Pete? Oh, you two would look so _good_ together. I can _just_ see the pictures. _Click, click!_ ” He framed them with the thumb and index finger of both hands. Pete could swear he saw a dollar sign flash through his eyes like a cartoon villain’s. 

“You know, my Nana knows this great disembowelment curse,” Ashlee said conversationally as soon as Perez had left them for the next hot ticket. “Claims she hasn’t used it in a long time, but I’m pretty sure the recipe’s still good.”

Pete felt a smile trying to surface at the memory, though it never made it to his lips, as everything came together in a flash of realization, the bits of his dream returning to mind: Perez wasn’t simply being obtuse, he actually didn’t know _how_ to take off the spell, and despite all Pete’s research, the fact of it was it didn’t really matter what exact brand of magic the curse sourced its power from, what the specific wording of the incantation was, or in which language — it was bound to Patrick’s blood, proper blood magic which needed blood to be undone; warm, _human_ blood pumped through the chambers of a heavy human heart, and not the fiery black fluid that flowed, too-fast, through Pete’s own veins; not the heart-shaped void in his chest that his skin peeling back would surely expose like an open wound. Patrick needed the one antidote that Pete couldn’t distill. 

Pete sat up and tumbled out of bed, cursing under his breath, _fuck, fuck_ , scared of waking Patrick, of having to explain what he was doing there and why he had to not be there anymore, but Patrick didn’t wake, didn’t even stir; he slept on, oblivious. On the ceiling, the clouds darkened, veined with lightning. 

By the time he got back to his own room, he felt utterly worn out from the voyage across the hallway, his legs taking him as far as his bed and then giving. He fell into it, sliding under the embroidered, lead-gray velvet bedspread, his head sinking into the pillows, nerveless, sleepless. Heartless. It was alright — at some point, he would forget. He might even forget the way Patrick’s eyes shone, sometimes, bright like bottled stars, like Calcifer when Pete had first seen him, a shooting star mirrored on the black surface of the lake. 

“Calcifer?” he whispered. “Do you remember what it was like to be a star?”

“What, the good old days?” his friend replied, his voice soft but unusually clear, as if speaking right next to Pete’s ear. “Of course I do. You know we don’t forget anything.” 

“Right. So, what was it like?” Pete asked again, though he felt his thoughts slipping away from him, his head drifting upwards to the ceiling, towards the dark clouds. 

“It was… freedom.” Calcifer replied, still speaking softly, as if afraid of hurting someone suffering from a migraine. “You know what I mean — timeless, limitless magic. It was a fucking blast. The sky was so very cold, though.”

“Yeah, cold, isn’t it?” It was getting harder and harder to follow the thread, to remember what he should be thinking about, as the clouds started to change shape, sprouting misshapen limbs like curling vines, black eyes gawking straight at him. “The clouds, look — it’s starting. I’m so sorry, I can’t help it, god, the thunder, the monsters — will Andy get annoyed? Will Patrick be afraid? Fuck, I’d better take something before it gets too crazy—” Pete reached for the bedside drawer, blindly rooting through it until he grabbed a bottle; he twisted the lid open without looking, scattering its contents beside the black halo of his hair spilling on the pillow. He made a fist, gathering a handful of blue pills — these ones were spiked with a sleeping draught, and would knock him out, putting a stop to the destructive magic. He brought one to his lips, and another, three, four, swallowing them dry. “I’m. I’m really sorry.”

“There’s no need, Pete. It’s okay. No more pills, now, please?” Calcifer said into his ear, soft as ever, if a bit pleading.

“You got it, buddy,” Pete said, a pinch of shame in his chest. “Sorry for this, too. I know you— worry.” He trailed off, swallowing at his dry throat that was rubbed all wrong from the pills going down, wishing that they would kick in soon, wishing for some quiet. “Calcifer? I’m sorry for stealing you away. I just felt so fucking lonely, and so weak, and you shone so bright.” 

“Pete, what are you talking about? I was lonely, too. I wanted to be caught.”

Pete just hummed in response, his eyes going out of focus and sliding shut. Overhead, the monsters became clouds again, and started to clear. 


	7. In which we need umbrellas on the inside

After the party, strange things started to happen in the house, or rather — stranger things, as Patrick had already come to accept strange ones were par for the course. Pete didn’t leave his room that first morning, but that was typical, and Patrick went back to work on the piano, which in his opinion was a better option than stewing over hangovers and stupid curses and hot drunk wizards who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. But, as he worked, the lights kept flickering off, or, when they stayed on, somehow changing hue, dousing the whole room in a chilly glare, like those unsettling neon lights in parking garages that always made Patrick feel like the next victim in a serial killer movie. 

Trying to stay calm, but feeling as out of his depth as on the first day of his curse, Patrick went in search of Andy, who he’d soon recognized as the other reasonable being in the house besides himself — though, in light of his own behavior the previous night, he should probably revise that title to the _only_ reasonable being in the house. Following the sound of drums, Patrick climbed down to the basement, where he found Andy beating furiously on his poor drum kit, wearing nothing but a pair of black gym shorts and a thin layer of sweat. He stopped playing when he saw Patrick hovering at the door, and gestured him in. Patrick walked closer, trying not to stare at the expanse of colorful tattooed muscle. He might have been half in love with someone else, but he still had eyes. 

“Sorry to interrupt, but is the house… acting up, or something?” he asked tentatively. 

“Yeah...” Andy sighed, setting his drum sticks down to rest on the snare. “He just gets like this, sometimes.”

“He?” Patrick clarified, the word snagging him, unexpected.

“Pete,” Andy confirmed, his mouth shifting around an unfortunate expression, perhaps the first time Patrick saw him make one. Andy went on slowly: “His moods... affect the house. It’s not even too bad, this time. We’ve seen worse.”

“Right,” Patrick said, dubious but absorbing it, willing his mouth not to make a completely horrible, unhappy frown at it. He couldn’t be entirely sure how much Andy had seen when he interrupted them in the study last night, but he also wasn’t up to revealing his whole hand just yet, especially amid the lingering headache and awful confusion that swelled up; the last he had seen of Pete was the goodnight kiss at his bedroom door and — the makeup stain on his pillowcase. Somehow, Pete had gone from determined to clear up his curse right then on the spot to crying a flood of inky tears to making the lights appear cold and miserable: _My moods shape shift_ — one phrase from Pete’s journal, black scrawled on parchment, surfaced in Patrick’s mind from the night before. “Did he like, say anything?” 

“Not exactly. There’s nothing much for anyone to do,” Andy said, shrugging, though his face was softened, sympathetic, if helpless. “Best thing is to leave him alone, and buckle in. It’ll pass.”

Patrick wasn’t convinced — quite literally sick to his stomach at the idea of Pete, in turmoil, alone in his room. But Andy surely knew better, as he had known Pete “forever” (in Pete’s own words), and clearly Pete trusted him to deal with just about every aspect of his own life. It was obvious, by now, that Pete, Calcifer, and the house shared some sort of magical bond, but that was about as far as Patrick got before starting to flounder. The stormy weather wasn’t that hard to interpret, especially in light of Pete never having made any mystery of his “mood swings” and saying all kinds of disparaging things about his brain — and that was before Patrick had even found his journals. “This time,” Andy had said — so that meant it was a regular occurrence. Which was certainly said to soothe Patrick’s concern, and perhaps did help with taking it all less personally, but, weirdly enough, only really succeeded in exacerbating it, like salt in a wound, as he then started thinking about all those previous times and feeling, absurdly, like he should have been there; of course he didn’t have the slightest clue how to help, nor any indication that Pete could have used his company, neither back then nor now.

Though Patrick was armed with some measure of insight, it didn’t lessen the bone-chilling air or gray overcast clouds inside the house, and after considering his options, observing the study closely, he decided on carrying Pete’s journal and an acoustic guitar, one in each arm, to the patio outside for the fresh air. 

The water there was as still as ever, a sharp contrast to the storm brewing inside, and somehow unaffected by the house, so Patrick took refugee in it, settling himself into a massive, sprawling chaise lounge — propping Pete’s journal open on the little table beside it, likely meant for drinks, and now playing host to Patrick’s extra guitar pick and coffee and notes. 

He couldn’t get Pete’s words out of his head anyway — they tumbled around between all of his other thoughts, like finding loose stones skipping through the surface of his mind, surprised when he caught one of them to realize, as he turned it over, that it wasn’t his own, but Pete’s. And as he looked at the pages of Pete’s journal, it was as if the words were jumping off the parchment, begging to be let loose, hot to the touch where they felt especially compelling, as if, threaded together and seeped through the strings of his guitar, they could transmutate and become something harder and polished and refined; gold out of lead. 

  
  


On the second Pete-less morning, as Patrick was fixing himself some coffee in the kitchen, and drafting a mental to-do list for the day — it included taking the guitar outside again, and writing more songs, or perfecting the one he had, and, mostly, trying not to vibrate out of his skin with anxiety and disquiet and worry — he heard Calcifer call to him softly, almost whispering. Patrick looked around, and finally spotted a weak orange-yellow flame in the microwave display; it was the tiniest Patrick had ever seen him, the demon’s eyes barely as big as a pair of white thumbtacks. “Hey, little guy. You okay? What is it?”

“Look, it’s not that I _care_ ,” Calcifer began, and then launched into some sort of anxious, rapid-fire babble: “It’s just — annoying, you know, to see him all torn up! I hate it, when he gets these fucking episodes, ’cause he starts making shadows and then the shadows start sprouting fangs and claws and stuff, and it’s not much fun, like, for anybody, and Andy gets all irritated and the house gets all weird and, like — when Pete cries, he makes rainy clouds, and I fucking hate when that happens.” He paused, then concluded, pouting: “We don’t like damp, you know.”

“You know, I’m worried, too,” Patrick said, letting out a sigh. “I’m not sure what to do, though.”

“I mean, I happen to know that he really likes it when you sing.” Calcifer’s voice sounded less whiny, more assured as he insisted: “So, will you please go see him?”

“Yes, of course,” Patrick said, finally receiving the green light that he hadn’t realized he was holding his breath for, already hastily pouring another cup of coffee, adding heaps of milk and sugar to it, unlike his own. Honestly, he thought, not even the threat of monster shadows could stop him — whatever all that was about. 

  
  


He’d never been inside Pete’s bedroom before; the door was usually closed, and Patrick wasn’t in the habit of opening closed doors in the house since that day he’d found a furry albino tarantula as big as his hand hiding in the pantry and shrieked in a shameful way (after sitting him down with an appeasing cup of tea, Pete had apologized profusely for not warning him, and explained that she was a friend’s familiar, visiting to lend a hand, or well, a claw, for a protection spell Pete was working on, and she had an unfortunate Reese’s cups habit). 

Patrick knocked, shifting the coffee cup from one hand to the other to do so, but no answer came from within; he figured Calcifer’s suggestion served as an invitation and turned the handle, bracing himself for the worst. “I’m coming in,” he announced as the door opened silently, revealing the largest and messiest bedroom he’d ever laid eyes on. It looked like a teenage punk and an emo wizard had joined forces and belongings, and then the wizard had conjured a hurricane just for the heck of it. 

The wizard in question was lying in bed, an enormous dark wood four-poster that made him look very small, his golden skin gone pale and ashen. Patrick made his way there, stepping between the clothes and shoes and — was that a turntable? — scattered on the ground; a black acoustic guitar was propped in a corner; the small bedside table cluttered with books and vials and crystals and tarot cards, which he pushed aside to make space for the cup. Pete’s eyes were closed, but Patrick didn’t think he was asleep so much as forcing himself to lie perfectly still. 

“I made coffee,” Patrick said, his voice echoing loudly though it was barely above a whisper. “You should drink it while it’s still hot. Caffeine headaches can be really nasty.” 

No reply; no movement; as undisturbed as the pool outside had been. Maybe Andy had been right, after all — perhaps Calcifer had asked Patrick to check on him only out of panic, when Pete really wanted to be alone. Patrick couldn’t help reaching out to brush his fingertips over the back of Pete’s hand, gingerly, hoping against reason that Pete wouldn’t even feel it, wouldn’t be disturbed. In all that stillness, Patrick almost expected to register cold, as if he’d touched the lifelike marble hand of a statue, but Pete’s skin was burning hot instead, just like every time they’d touched. Patrick sighed, and started to pull his hand back, only to freeze as Pete’s fingers finally moved, curling around his own. 

“Patrick,” Pete whispered, turning his head on the pillow towards him, but without meeting his eyes. 

“I’m here,” Patrick said, every other possible reply rising to the surface of his mind feeling excessive and sentimental and ridiculous — but he sat down on the edge of the bed and held Pete’s hand tighter, hoping that would still convey some part of his meaning. 

“Why?” Pete asked. 

The thoughts in Patrick’s head still felt too big, too fierce, like that ballooning feeling in his chest from the night of the party, consuming him, like Pete’s intensity had rubbed off on him. He tried to find something _normal_ to say, something that would feel more like a soft piano chord and less like the polyphonic spree in his head. “Calcifer told me you like my singing,” he tried. 

“He’s right,” Pete said, his voice still low, as rough as if he’d been screaming.

“I could sing for you, if you like,” Patrick offered, taking in the soft slope of Pete’s jawline, the curve of his nose — what he could make out, anyway, from Pete’s head angled away from him. “I — kind of wrote a song, actually,” Patrick said, without exactly meaning to, arriving at the idea all at once; Pete’s journals appeared fresh and sharp in his mind, the ink on the page as clear to him as the fine, baby hairs fanning across Pete’s forehead, too short and soft to grow any further than that.

Pete finally raised his eyes to meet Patrick’s, and shifted onto his side, curling towards him. “What?” he asked, and there was the briefest flash of fire in his eyes, the briefest flash of white teeth between his chapped lips. “You _write_ songs?”

“Yeah, kind of,” Patrick said, shrugging. Then, pointing to the dusty guitar: “Can I borrow that? It would be better on the piano, but — it’s not functional yet. And, uhm, I hope you don’t mind, but I already borrowed your words, too.” 

Now Pete’s attention was steadfast, rapt on Patrick’s face. He didn’t say anything further, so Patrick figured that was his cue. He got up to grab the guitar and sat back down to strum an A minor chord, gingerly, expecting a discordant jangle and finding it, instead, perfectly tuned. 

He’d always felt self-conscious as he sang, but nothing was what it was before, anymore, so he decided not to care. He opened his mouth and out came, softly and gently, the melody he’d been picking at by the pool earlier: “ _You’re the last of a dying breed, pour our names in the wet concrete. I wonder if your therapist knows everything about me_.” As he sang, his voice grew stronger: “ _I’m here in search of your glory, there’s been a million before me. That ultra kind of love…_ ” He didn’t know why his voice caught, though, as he reached the end of the chorus, “ _You never walk away from._ ” The last notes grew quiet again, nearly whispered, “ _You’re just the last of the real ones_.” He delicately hummed a bit of melody after that and let the last chord echo, finally muting the strings by wrapping his palm around the neck of the guitar. 

“Patrick,” Pete said, struck. “Where did you _find_ those lyrics?” His eyes shone.

“Just some of your journals, in the study,” Patrick said, feeling a bit self-conscious, his cheeks flushing. “Probably, I should have asked.” 

“Anything in that room, it’s yours,” Pete murmured. “That was — that didn’t sound like anything I wrote.”

“It is,” Patrick insisted. “Here, let me — that was the chorus, let me start from the top.” So he cleared his throat to begin again, and Pete settled in against the pillows and sheets. His face was still ashen and sullen, but his eyes stayed alight, trained onto Patrick’s face. 

Eventually, as Patrick went on, singing him the first verse, playing very softly — “ _I was just an only child of the universe, and then I found you,_ ”— Pete’s eyes began to drift shut, his breathing slowing and evening out into a restful sleep. Patrick stayed until the song was finished; somehow, through singing it to Pete, he’d unlocked the bit of the bridge — the words from one of Pete’s journal entries, “ _the beginning of the end, the end of infinity with you,”_ drifting into his mind as he played — that was giving him trouble, that he kept getting tangled up in. It made the song fit together, whole, he thought, watching Pete’s chest rise and fall with his breath. 

  
  


When Patrick went to take his place by the pool again that afternoon, his usual chaise longue was already occupied. Pete was sprawled on it languidly, wearing an oversized pair of shades that covered half his face and not much else. “Calcifer reminded me that us fragile mortals need to lie in the sun sometimes,” he said by way of explanation as Patrick approached, without raising his head. 

“He has a point,” Patrick said, stopping right beside him and wishing very hard for a similar pair of sunglasses to hide behind. He was sure he was blushing furiously — he could have blamed the sun for that, perhaps, though not for the way his eyes kept straying towards Pete’s tattoos. Patrick didn’t actually know _what_ to do with himself.

“He usually does,” Pete said. It almost looked like the raindrops tattooed on his wrists were alive, falling towards the palm of his hand. 

“You can see them better if you look by mistake,” Pete said, smiling softly at what, Patrick realized, must have been a very bemused expression on his own face. “Like, catch them unawares.”

Patrick tried turning his head towards the palm trees swaying gently in the distance, and sure enough, as he watched Pete out of the corner of his eye, the little raindrops fell faster, and the snake curling around Pete’s bicep tightened its coils and showed its tiny forked tongue. Even though Pete had just warned him, he couldn’t help the start of surprise, or turning to try to look more closely, which of course only made them slow and freeze. 

Pete laughed a little, and the sound flooded relief through Patrick, momentarily distracting him from the rest of the ink splayed across Pete’s revealed skin, enough to remind him to take a seat, too; he laid the acoustic guitar to rest gently against the side of the accompanying chaise lounge beside Pete before following suit. 

“More songs?” Pete asked, hooking his chin towards the guitar and the journal held in Patrick’s hand. His arm was slung above his head, and as he turned to look towards Patrick, he pillowed his cheek in the crook of his elbow. 

Patrick said, “That was the plan,” but had trouble coming up with much more to say, feeling that the plan was, indeed, quite past tense and that he’d never be able to concentrate now. From this view, he could make out the tattoo curled over the back of Pete’s forearm; its deep blue ombre of color paired with black and grey mirrored the make-up stain Patrick had woken up to the morning after the party, and formed the shape of a not-quite human, a not-quite boy with long hair and massive wings with dark feathers that ruffled in a breeze when Patrick remembered not to look too closely. He wanted to reach out and touch, smooth the feathers down — and somehow managed to get ahold of his mouth again before he did. “What’s this one?” he asked, pointing with one hand, nearly grazing it with his fingernail. 

“This one,” Pete said, half-frowning. He rubbed the flat of his palm over the tattoo like it itched or burned. “A friend’s interpretation, you could say, of a portrait.” 

“Of you?” Patrick asked, surprised. But as he looked, he began to see it — the jagged, lengthy hair nearly covering one eye, only blown back by the wind. “At least they got your aesthetic.” 

Pete’s mouth twisted over a smirk at that. “At least,” he said. And then: “When did you discover that journal anyway? Must be ages old.” 

Patrick figured that was Pete’s way of not wishing to speak any further of his tattoos, so he didn’t ask after the winged heart-shaped padlock with “unlovable” scripted on a gently fluttering scroll, or the necklace of barbed wire whose thorns cradled the silver moon pendant like miniature skeletal hands, and instead told Pete about bumping the book off the shelf the night of the party, and all the companion journals he then discovered that seemed to have crawled out of the woodwork, suddenly at his disposal, as if he’d unlocked some secret library by pulling loose that first book. 

“I used to write pages upon pages, every day, as a kid,” Pete said, reaching for the journal and starting to leaf through it carelessly, as it if was one of those horrid glossy magazines and not the unique collection of poetry that Patrick knew it to be — gold ore to be mined for precious lyrics. “God, I couldn’t shut up.”

Patrick’s mouth was already shaping itself around a strongly worded objection, but he didn’t have time to express it before he noticed, as Pete set the notebook down on the little table, a glimmer between his fingers. There — on Pete’s left middle finger. Looking closer, he could see that it was a tiny star, drawn in silvery, opalescent strokes. Another tattoo, then, though the very opposite of the inky black of the others — Patrick was probably noticing it now only because it had briefly caught and reflected the sunlight. 

“What’s that one for?” Patrick couldn’t help but ask, his attention caught again, forgetting about the careful way Pete had changed the subject. 

“In remembrance of an old friend,” Pete said, drawing his hand in and away from the light as if to protect it; his voice was so low that Patrick could barely hear it. “Or rather, what he used to—” 

Then a cloud seemed to pass overhead, dousing them in gray shade, and Pete grew quiet, his sunglasses appearing heavy on his face, keeping something in rather than blocking something out, as he murmured, “It was a long time ago. And there are things more permanent than tattoos, anyway.”

Patrick thought he nearly _ought_ to ask, that the statement practically begged him for it, but he couldn’t quite seem to get the words out between feeling guilty for forcing Pete into the conversation to begin with and how Pete’s face had grown drawn again; whatever was dogging him before must’ve returned, weighing on his mind. 

  
  


That evening, in the kitchen, Patrick assembled a dinner of PB & J sandwiches and fresh fruit, and after setting everything on a long, rectangular tray, he went back up to Pete’s room. 

Pete started to sit up as soon as Patrick came in, moving carefully as if to avoid setting off a wave of nausea, even managing to dredge up a faint, fond smile from the exhaustion so starkly drawn on his face and saying, “Back again?” 

Sitting poolside had seemed to refresh him, but perhaps it was preemptive and fleeting — whatever had been weighing heavily on Pete _had_ returned, full force, after all. “With sustenance,” Patrick said, aiming for optimism, proffering the tray. 

He didn’t have time to set it down as the smile disappeared and Pete sighed, wearily, and slung his arm across his face to hide it. “I don’t know why you bother with it, Patrick,” he said, his eyes firmly covered by his forearm. “You should give up on me, you know. I’ve certainly given up on myself.”

Patrick clung onto the tray more tightly at that, the metal cutting into his palms, his heart giving a miserable, injured _thump_. “I wish you wouldn’t say that,” he said. “You’re so much better than what you give yourself credit for. You’ve been nothing but kind to me, and—”

“Patrick, I got you fucking _cursed_ ,” Pete burst out, his arm falling away from his face to nail Patrick with a hard look, the curtain slamming coldly shut across his eyes, like they’d looked when Pete found him in the study the night of the party, though now, Pete’s mouth trembled, hardly containing something in. 

It ignited Patrick’s chest, a flare going off. “That wasn’t your fault! And I know you’ve been working so hard to undo it.” 

“Yeah, right,” Pete scoffed, and turned his head the opposite way, as if he didn’t want to see. 

Patrick rid himself of the tray, hurriedly placing it on the end table, doing his best to avoid disrupting the bowl of fruit carefully nested on its top, and took up his post on the side of the bed, trying to reason with the tangled, pitch black hair at the back of Pete’s head. “Look, I’ve seen the way you’ve buried yourself in those creepy books bound in human leather or something, you’ve done nothing but that for weeks, looking up every possible counterspell—”

“I tell so many lies that sometimes I can’t even remember what’s real,” Pete whispered, defeated. “So many lies. Letting you think that I— but Patrick, I can’t. I _can’t_ break your curse.” 

Maybe that was just Pete beating himself up, Patrick thought. Maybe he was so used to being good at everything right from the start that not getting immediate results in this case had thrown him into a crisis. Or maybe it was true, and he couldn’t break the curse. Either way, Patrick felt strangely calm as he asked the question, though he knew, by instinct, that it was one of the most important questions he would ever ask: “Why not?”

“Because it’s blood magic that Perez somehow used,” Pete said, hoarsely. “And to undo a blood curse you need a heart.”

 _If I end up surviving this, when I tell this story to my grandchildren_ , _this will be the moment where they gasp aloud_ , Patrick thought — _“The wizard didn’t have a heart?!”_ It sounded dramatic enough to be straight out of a fairytale. But right then, it wasn’t charming or narratively satisfying, it was his actual life — with wizards and curses and sentient houses and, now, missing hearts. Suddenly he remembered the people talking at the party, about contracts with demons. So they’d gotten that one thing right. 

“And you — traded your heart? For magic or for—?” Patrick put together, furrowing his eyebrows in thought. 

“I was a stupid kid,” Pete said, closing his eyes, as if embarrassed, unable to bear the memory. “Alone all the time, just out of this really awful bootcamp for misguided youth like me that needed to be straightened out, and I thought, like— what use could I have for a heart anyway? What did it ever do for me? I had my magic, but— not any real _power_ , not fame. Seemed like a small price to pay, especially when I felt I had _nothing_. I was like, fifteen, and found this very old spell, in a very old book, to catch a shooting star, and I didn’t realize—”

“That was Calcifer, right?” Patrick asked, recalling with sudden clarity Pete’s tattoo — the way Pete’s voice had dropped when he tried to answer who it was for, the cloud that passed over them and doused the light, though the ink had still shone brightly from between Pete’s fingers, just like a real star. “What happened?”

“It’s like — the star eats your heart, right, but you don’t die. It feels like you’re dying but you’re not, because you have the demon’s power, now — I guess it must be similar to an electric shock. I passed out, and when I woke up I was, like, burning from the inside.”

“And now?” Patrick swallowed, keeping the flood of protectiveness at bay from just the thought of Pete alone and young and thinking everything was all his fault, believing even then that he wasn’t enough by himself. 

Pete turned to face him, but seemed unable to meet his eyes. “Now,” Pete continued, “I got used to it.” He gestured emptily at his chest, his hand falling slack into the bedsheets. “Nothing’s changed. Except you know how truly sad and selfish I am. You deserve so fucking much more than me — I’m like a black hole, and worst of all, I can’t even help you, after I’ve gone and made you think I could.” 

“Pete, I —” Patrick didn’t know how to tell him that what he’d seen earlier today even by the pool and in Pete’s journals and on the night of the party when they almost — someone like that, couldn’t actually possibly be heartless, regardless of anatomy. “Wait, look, forgive me for missing it, I guess, but I don’t see in the grand scheme of things what the big deal is. Okay, you traded your heart, but that doesn’t erase all the other parts of you.”

“Don’t you get it?” Pete said, flabbergasted. “Patrick, no one does that anymore, selling their heart, not for a long time. _No one_ gives it away, it’s fucking. Dark, taboo, dirty magic. If people knew — well, let’s say no one would come to my parties anymore.”

“Good fucking riddance,” Patrick said, shrugging. “You said it — you were just a kid. You made a mistake. So what?” Maybe he was being too honest, too biased or intentionally obtuse, but other than the matter of his curse, he didn’t see whatever exchange a lonely _kid_ made had anything to do with now, how it changed Pete at all. 

“So _what?_ ” Pete went on, outraged: “That’s why — look, Perez discovered, back then, who I am, how I got my power or whatever, and he’s been holding it against me ever since, at least unless I do his bidding. That’s why you got mixed up in all this to begin with, it was just a way for him to remind me.” He sighed enormously, under what seemed to be a massive weight pressed to his chest, perhaps the weight that had returned to his mind by the pool. “It’s all my _fault_. You should hate me, you know. Just like everyone else. But this is who I am.” 

He shrugged, helpless, as if offering what he deemed nothing and yet was everything — himself, alone in the bed, which seemed to swallow him up, surrounded by all his scattered belongings. “So it’s impossible, you see.” He took a breath. “I gave my heart away, it’s gone — consumed by the heat of a star — and there’s zip zero, nada, nothing, I mean _nothing_ to do for it.”

That stilled Patrick for a moment — _things more permanent than a tattoo_ indeed — distracting him from defending Pete over the rest of it; there was a tinkering in the back of his mind, like he was trying to find something he’d misplaced.

But then Pete burst out with: “You’re better off getting out of here.”

And Patrick found himself immediately pulled to the present to adamantly reply: “Pete, I’m _not_ going to leave you.”

“No,” Pete said, gaining momentum, ignoring him entirely, “You absolutely should. You should find someone normal to get a crush on, and then you’ll give me a call, and it’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, I’ll help you with the counterspell, and Perez won’t think we have anything to do with each other, and I’ll just —” His throat seemed to close up at that, but the look in his eye was fiercely determined. 

“Yeah,” Patrick said, ignoring every part of Pete’s plan entirely in return. “That’s going to be a problem.” 

“Why?” Pete said, exasperated. “It doesn’t need to be some shit like true love, we just need enough oxytocin flowing through both of you so that the counterspell can bind to it and do its job. So, what’s the issue?” 

“The _issue_ ,” Patrick emphasized, “is that I might already be in love with someone else.” 

“Well, great,” Pete said, though he didn’t look wholly relieved; rather, he looked thrown, folding in on himself until he was small and lost in the wide bed. “Bring them here. We’ll do it tomorrow.” 

“But I’m telling you, according to what you said, that’s not going to work.” 

“Why not? I’m assuming this person has a heart?” 

Pete said it sardonically, but Patrick took a breath to brace himself: “You’re assuming wrong.”

That caught Pete’s attention; suddenly, he sat up straight, fighting against the sheets to better face Patrick, his eyes sharp. “Patrick,” he said. “You _can’t_. I can’t — reciprocate. Not the way you deserve.” Though for all his protesting, he sounded almost — relieved and elated.

“So you don’t feel anything for me, is that it?” Patrick said, stubbornly, his chest igniting again.

“No,” Pete said, and it looked like though it killed him to say it, he’d die before letting Patrick think otherwise. “Of _course_ I do, but it’s not — it’s not gonna be enough for the curse. Why would you want this, say this, when we already know it’s not going to work?”

“Well, I have this theory,” Patrick said. “May I?”

Pete raised an eyebrow, and Patrick leant forward intentionally, his glasses slipping down his nose a bit at the angle, telegraphing his movement.

Pete nodded silently at that, his mouth looking trapped shut, but he didn’t move away, not even as Patrick lent further, bracing himself on the bedspread, reaching for the side of Pete’s jaw, letting his fingers curl there like he hadn’t allowed himself to the other night, like he’d only imagined; Pete’s skin was soft and warm as ever, and Patrick only had a moment to appreciate it before he was busy finally, _finally_ appreciating Pete’s lips: impossibly softer and warmer, pressed sweetly to his own in a kiss. 

Patrick didn’t hurry away, sighed into it without meaning to, and felt Pete reach for him in return: his fingers stroking down the fine hairs at the back of Patrick’s neck. 

He pulled back slowly, not wanting to disturb Pete’s hand — hardly wishing to pull away at all, but he needed to see if his hunch was right. “Pete, hey,” he said, softly into the air between them. “Tell me, how do I look?” 

Pete’s eyes fluttered open and he moved his hand to search Patrick’s face for the tell-tale wrinkles and lines, but he frowned. “You look — like _you_. Except, your hair’s still all white. It’s not like the curse is broken, not exactly. I can still feel it, but it’s fading — weaker.” 

“That’s what I thought,” Patrick said. “Well, kind of. Hoped, at least.” Against all hope. 

“Fuck,” Pete swore. He hadn’t let go of Patrick’s face, and kept him near, his thumb running down Patrick’s cheek. “I can’t _explain_ this.” He leant in again, kissed the corner of Patrick’s mouth, the arch of his cheekbone, the tip of his nose. Then looked at him critically. “So what was your theory?”

“Nothing very scientific, I’m afraid,” Patrick said, around a smile. “Just — there’s something, when I’m around you, that makes me feel so full of life. Like I could burst with it. It’s like — the opposite of this fucking curse.” 

“Oh, well,” Pete said, resting his forehead against Patrick’s, his fingers stroking softly behind his ear, the glimmer of a smile that he was trying to hide answering for him. “Still doesn’t mean that I can break it.” 

“I know, but— it’s got to mean something, right?” Patrick said optimistically, still braced on the bedsheets, his arm starting to ache a bit from the angle, his glasses falling further.

But Pete responded by tightening his hand and pulling Patrick’s mouth to his own, sighing between Patrick’s lips, and Patrick forgot about all the rest of it, Pete’s kisses erasing any trace of discomfort, until he remembered the abandoned tray and the fact that Pete hadn’t eaten anything after that morning’s coffee. 

“Wait,” he said, muttering first against Pete’s mouth, and then pulling back. “I brought dinner, we should—” 

Pete laughed. “You finally let me kiss you, and then try to distract me with food?”

“I mean. It’s peanut butter and jelly,” Patrick said, and felt himself blushing furiously, somehow, for the _sandwiches_ rather than the kissing. 

“Well, in that case,” Pete said, kissing him once more, softly, like a promise — _to be continued_ — before he leant back against the headboard, allowing Patrick to set the tray on the bed. They ate together, Pete insisting on splitting the sandwich, and the most occult topic of conversation was Pete explaining the acoustic insulation spell that allowed Andy to bang on his drums even at the freakishly early time in the morning that he favored. 

“Thank you,” Pete said, eventually, and Patrick tried to brush the gratitude away the same way he swept the crumbs away from the bedding and into a napkin, thinking he should probably let Pete get some rest. 

Though, Patrick himself had barely slept the night before, sick with worry and having dearly missed the reassurance of Pete’s presence at his side all through the afternoon, and now, worry abated — now that, despite everything, Pete was alive, and safe, and _his_ , as much as Patrick could say such a thing — the last thing he wanted to do was leave him. “Can I sleep here? With you?” he whispered into the silence. The door felt very far away. 

Pete waved his fingers into the air and the lights lowered gradually until the room was nearly dark, then he pulled back the covers so that Patrick could lie down next to him. “Always,” Pete murmured back, sounding half-asleep already. Once Patrick properly climbed in, ridding himself of his jeans, the tray set aside again, sinking into the sheets like a warm bath, Pete wrapped his arms around Patrick as if to keep him near through the night.


	8. In which all true treasure lies within

Patrick was awoken by a chime, similar to the sound he’d heard in his shop on first meeting Pete — weeks ago, though it felt more like years had passed. Next to him, Pete slept on, perfectly still, and Patrick would have done anything — sing to him, learn a magic spell, whatever — to avoid his waking up. Remembering how, that first night, Pete had stopped the chime by tapping on his necklace, Patrick reached out — he didn’t have to reach far, as Pete had shifted during the night and was now curled up, very close and facing him — and brushed his fingertips over the crescent moon pendant. It did the trick: the chime stopped, and the room dropped into near silence, the only sounds Pete’s soft, regular breathing and Patrick’s rougher one. He didn’t remove his hand, instead pressing it softly over Pete’s chest. Knowing what he now knew, he realized there was no fluttery beat inside Pete’s ribcage, and though he knew Pete was alive, breathing, _okay_ , he was still deeply upset by that absence — what was even there? A hole where something should have been? A heart-shaped flame, heating up Pete’s blood and his skin, burning in the depth of his eyes? Patrick thought of Calcifer, munching happily on eggshells as he burned bright and smiling from the kitchen burner, and somehow couldn’t really picture him devouring a kid’s heart. Suddenly, Patrick was reminded of a conversation he’d had in the kitchen, the little demon puffing up proudly when Patrick had told him he was special. What if—

He should tell Pete in the morning — except, he could not bear to give him hope, not if this turned out to be nothing more than a flight of fancy. He had to find out immediately, and had to do it alone. Slowly, careful not to disturb the sheets, he slid out of bed. The air in the room was cold — unnaturally so, perhaps a lingering effect of Pete’s episode, Patrick thought. Shivering, he put on his jeans and snatched a gray sweater that was draped on the back of an armchair before padding out of the room. He turned back one last time to check that Pete was still sleeping peacefully, before quietly shutting the door behind his back.

“Calcifer?” he called out once he was in the dark hallway. As he waited for an answer, he put on the sweater, which was way too big for him, the sleeves partly covering his hands, the bottom hem coming down to his thighs. The little flame crackled up sleepily from — his phone, Patrick realized, pulling it out of his pocket at the feel of its vibration. There Calcifer was, flickering to life, on the face of it.

“Weird question, maybe? But — where are you?” Patrick asked, holding his phone out in front of him and still keeping his voice low, though Pete had looked dead to the world, and Andy slept on the opposite side of the floor, several doors away.

“What do you mean?” Calcifer asked, burning a bit brighter, like he was slowly waking up. “I’m everywhere.”

“Yeah, I know, but listen— you’re a fire demon, you’re an actual fire somewhere, right? I _saw_ you that day in the jewelry store, and in the kitchen at breakfast.”

“Oh,” Calcifer said, flickering wildly now on the phone screen. “We can’t talk about that, Patrick.”

“But if I already know, you can tell me, right? Like my curse. So where is that flame now? Where is your hearth?”

For a second, Calcifer changed shape: the friendly, cartoonishly round-eyed creature’s flickering turned violent, dangerously crafting a not-quite human face in sharp spikes of multi-colored flame. In a blink, that frightening vision was gone, and the benign little demon Patrick had known all this time returned, wide-eyed and scared as he said: “Downstairs.”

“In the basement?” Patrick clarified.

“Lower,” Calcifer murmured, and then flickered out, leaving the hallway in the dark.

“Well, that’s not creepy at all,” Patrick said to himself. He wrapped the oversized sweater tighter across his shoulders, comforted by the scent that he knew by now belonged to Pete’s hair potion and clung to the soft fabric, and started his descent to the bottom of the house, using the light from his phone to guide him. Everything grew quiet as he climbed down, each marble step colder than the last under his bare feet. The air in the basement was freezing as Patrick reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around. How could he get lower than that? But then, he saw it: a trapdoor, at the far end of the basement hallway. 

It all felt a bit too much like an horror movie for his liking, but he went on — he didn’t feel very brave, or like what he was attempting was a particularly good idea, but at the same time he felt strangely safe, the benevolent presence of the house driving him on, like it would always protect him, like it wanted him to succeed, even in its altered state of cold disquiet — just like Pete had gotten feelings for him even without the advantage of possessing a heart. 

The trapdoor creaked ominously — of course — as Patrick opened it to reveal a steep wooden ladder whose lower end plunged into total darkness. “Well then,” Patrick said, nodding once to himself, resolute, tucking his phone into his pocket for safekeeping, and started climbing down. It was a feeling akin to lowering himself into a pool, the blackness like oil on his skin, lapping at his ankles, knees, hips. As soon as he got to the end of the ladder, though, a small, orange-tinged light appeared, shining through a door left slightly ajar at the end of an impossibly long hallway. The floor was warm under his feet, the length of the too-narrow corridor contracting to nothing as he closed the distance in the time it took to take a breath and was suddenly right in front of the door. It was smooth, black and featureless like a blackboard but for the handle, oxidized metal shaped like a feather, a faithful copy of the one that Patrick had pushed to enter the jewelry store on the first day of his curse, he realized. As he reached for the handle, his perception was slightly off, his hand dragging in slow-motion, making him feel he might miss, like in that unsettling moment in a dream when you actually realize you’re dreaming but cannot yet wake up. 

Though as soon as he stepped through the door, it was as if time started up again, a tape finding the correct speed to reproduce the rhythm of natural life, and he was inside the living room of a charming one-bedroom apartment he’d never seen before, complete with an exposed brick wall, high windows, and a small fireplace. Patrick walked over to the window and looked out; though he rationally knew he was one level down from a basement in Los Angeles, and should see nothing but dirt and concrete, he wasn’t surprised at the view of a tree-lined street of brownstones, sunny and deserted and undoubtedly situated somewhere in New York City. Just as he wasn’t surprised to see the papers covering the wooden desk that stood in the middle of the big open-space room, notebook pages filled with Pete’s handwriting, by now so familiar and beloved. He wanted to gather the messy pages together, smooth out their wrinkles, and decipher every thought that a younger Pete had wanted to write down in this place — because this was so clearly the place that Pete had called home before L.A., before fake friends and fame: it was made obvious by the acoustic bass in the corner, by the black hoodies and band t-shirts spilling out of the tiny built-in closet, by the books stacked in towers on the hardwood floor. 

But there wasn’t time — Patrick just brushed his fingers over one of the stacks of paper next to the vintage typewriter on the desk, almost expecting it to feel as hot as Pete’s skin, and called out: “Calcifer?”

“Here,” came a croaky voice from the fireplace. Patrick made his way there and crouched down in front of it to remove the screen and peek inside. Calcifer looked up at him, his eyes wide and dark, making him think of a trapped, frightened mouse. “Hi, Patrick.”

“Hey, buddy. Do you have something to show me?” Patrick asked, softly. The little fire nodded and pointed down with both tiny flame-arms, raising his tiny flame-eyebrows meaningfully. 

Patrick nodded, and looked around for something to use — there, a poker. He grabbed it, and started rifling around the ashes underneath Calcifer until he heard a thin, clinking sound: something small, metallic. Carefully, he dug around the hardened ash until he could see the object twinkling through the gray powder. “You can touch it,” Calcifer murmured. “It’s body temperature.”

 _Whose body, though?_ Patrick hoped for the best and plunged his hand into the ashes to pick it up. Calcifer was right, it was barely warmer than his own hand — a necklace, the chain thicker than that of Pete’s crescent moon, and a deep yellow gold rather than its pale silver. He cradled it in the palm of his hand and blew on it, revealing a heart-shaped pendant, throbbing warmly in his hand like a small life, a young bird fallen from the nest. A few words were engraved around the edge, next to the thin hinge along which the locket, Patrick figured, would click open to expose whatever was inside. The letters were so tiny as to be unreadable, but he recognized the pattern and length of the words as the motto printed on Pete’s strange calling card, on the back of the hoodies from his clothing line. So typical, Patrick thought, for Pete to hide his biggest secret in plain sight, hiding it even from himself, somehow. He curled his fingers tight around the locket. 

“You didn’t eat his heart, did you? It’s been right here the whole time. And you couldn’t tell anyone, because your contract with Pete is like my curse,” Patrick said as Calcifer kept watching him from the fireplace, crackling warily. He was probably supposed to say the words aloud, Patrick thought, in order for the spell-breaking, or whatever, to work. So he did: “All true treasure lies within.” The locket clicked open. 

Calcifer fizzled out; and immediately, the room was plunged into near darkness. Patrick looked to the window, but there was just nothingness outside. Then a tiny blue light flickered on, hovering in the air by his shoulder — an azure flame shaped like a homunculus, with a small teardrop head and slim arms and legs. It was Calcifer, and it wasn’t. Patrick looked down — nestled in his hand, inside the open heart-shaped locket, there was a black lump, pulsating faintly. It looked so small, and frail, and yet it kept on beating, and Patrick would give his own life before he’d let anything hurt it. Patrick cradled it softly in his palm again.

“Quick, now, bring it to him!” the little demon said, and it was, at least, the same crackling voice that had grown so familiar to Patrick. “Be careful, though — now that the contract is broken, the house is going to fall apart.”

“It’s going to _what_?” Patrick started to say — but Calcifer’s meaning became clear enough as they got into the hallway outside the little apartment’s front door, where the concrete floor was rippling like waves during a storm.

“Oh, right,” Patrick said faintly, and started to run. As he made his way back upstairs he tried to focus on the floor under his feet, both for fear of tripping and stumbling, and because watching the walls warp and pixelate and fade out was making him sick. He didn’t slow, not even for Andy shouting, “What’s happening?!” across the hall, yelling, “I don’t know!” frantically back to him and finally reaching Pete’s bedroom, or what was left of it — the walls were flickering, contracting and expanding around the fulcrum of Pete’s bed, in which he was apparently, unbelievably, still fast asleep. 

Patrick climbed on the bed in a breathless rush, straddled him and tried to shake him awake — to no avail. He realized with horror that Pete’s shoulder, where he’d gripped him, was cold under his touch. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chanted, suddenly terrified. “Calcifer, what do I do!”

“I don’t know, just fucking save him!” the demon whined, whimpering and hovering helplessly around Pete’s too-still head on the pillow. 

“Oh god, oh god, okay, here goes,” Patrick said. He tore open Pete’s henley sleep shirt, and carefully put the black lump on his chest, hopefully in the proper place where a heart was supposed to go, and breathed in, praying to everything weird and magical that might be able to hear his plea, and _pushed_. The heart went in. Warmth started immediately to spread from that spot, and when Patrick found the courage to move his hand and look up, Pete was staring back at him. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but Patrick couldn’t imagine he had anything important to say, so he didn’t let him. Instead, he kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him, until they were both breathless and Calcifer cleared his throat and said, “So — I’ll leave you two to it,” and floated away. 

The house was indeed falling apart — ceilings fading into the sky, mirrors shattering on the ground, walls tucking away into the floor, floors crumbling into dust and blowing away, the staircase rolling up like an old rug and disappearing with a _pop_ , until all that was left was the small apartment at the bottom of the house, its windows now looking onto Spring Street, at the center of Downtown. A breeze; sunlight; the sounds of traffic and the chatter of people milling on the sidewalk: all of that drifted in, but the two people on the bed took no notice. 


	9. In which everyone lives happily ever after

The first thing Pete saw upon opening his eyes — awakening from something deeper and darker than sleep — was Patrick, kneeling over him, straddled across his hips, his face backlit and shining as if a halo was slung over his head. _Patrick_ , he thought, _Patrick is still here_ , and gasped, and would have said something, except Patrick was kissing him, desperately, clinging to him, and Pete couldn’t help from clinging right back, pulling him closer and closer until they were pressed flush against each other. When they finally had to break the kiss to catch their breath, Patrick pressed a string of kisses under Pete’s jaw, his lips warm, as if hesitant to let Pete go. 

Pete shivered, realizing — Patrick’s lips felt _warm_ , warmer than his own skin. It was true, what he’d told Patrick: he had gotten used to the heat constantly burning through him, and now it was the strangest sensation, as if his body was filled with something fuzzy and soft, something that didn’t hurt. 

“Patrick — what...?” he gasped out at last.

“I found your heart,” Patrick said in a rush, pulling back. “Calcifer never ate it. He was keeping it safe all this time.”

“You — oh,” Pete said — he didn’t have any words, for once; they were knocked out of him. He raised both hands to cup Patrick’s face, looking up at him in wonder. Patrick put his palm on Pete’s chest, and Pete felt his heart thump up, like a small dog begging to be petted. Patrick’s eyes looked a bit damp at the corners, his face flushed — perhaps from the kissing, but perhaps from everything else, too. “You did it,” Pete said. 

“Well, Calcifer helped. Right, buddy?” Patrick said, and turned to look to his side, but there was only empty air. “Calcifer?” he called out.

“Wait,” Pete said, sitting up and, tragically, half dislodging Patrick from his lap. “Is this my old apartment?” Then it came to him: he had his _heart_ back. That meant the contract was done. Pete’s magic alone wasn’t enough to keep the house together, and Calcifer — he was free. 

Patrick didn’t seem too fazed by most of the house disappearing on him, at least. “Yeah, your heart was in the fireplace, down here. _Calcifer_!” he called again. “Where has he got to?”

“Our contract — you broke it early. It was for one hundred years, you know,” Pete said. “We both wanted out. I’m glad you did it.” And he was, even as he had to swallow around a sudden lump in his throat.

“Oh,” Patrick said softly, stopping in his search, clarity breaking upon him. “So he’s... gone?”

“He’s free,” Pete said, the words feeling empty and bare, and then, because Patrick looked sad, Pete lay his head down in his lap to distract him. Patrick started stroking his hair, which had grown seriously tangled as Pete languished in bed while everyone around him was apparently conspiring to save him. It could have been worse, he supposed — he didn’t have Calcifer anymore, but he had Patrick. He didn’t have a big sprawling mansion anymore — fuck, he was going to miss the pool — but he had the Brooklyn apartment where he’d been almost happy, back when he thought he could really write. He let his eyes roam around the small space — there it all was, his vintage typewriter, the notebooks, his guitar in a corner, the tiny, packed closet. He took a minute to mourn his walk-in wardrobe. If he hurried, he should be able to fetch some of his possessions with a retrieving spell, before they stopped existing altogether. Andy knew what to do in case of a magical emergency, at least — he would have salvaged the essentials already and fled to Ashlee’s house. Pete looked up at Patrick, who was wearing a soft smile and —

“Hey,” Pete said, squinting, “is that my sweater?” He tugged at the sleeve for emphasis.

“Yeah, sorry. I stole it. You need it back?” Patrick said, not sounding especially sorry, smiling more brightly than the sunshine coming in through the windows. 

Pete shook his head. “You can keep it. Might have kept that other thing, as well. It’s yours, anyway.”

  
  


In the end, breaking the curse was kind of anticlimactic. That was normal — counterspells being, as they were, a removal or banishment, they usually didn’t consist in much more than something going _poof_ into the ether. In this case, one morning in their now modest kitchen with its dark-grained countertops and matte black appliances and minimalist, glass containers for only the lowest possible number of cooking utensils, Pete made coffee in the fancy glass pour-over, one of the only concessions to his former lifestyle, and put a spoonful of one-eighth the antidote powder in Patrick’s cup, muttering the incantation under his breath as he stirred it carefully in.

“Here you go. Drink up,” he told Patrick, sliding the mug across the countertop. 

“Hmm, this is good coffee,” Patrick said, and then jumped a bit, and rubbed at his arms, shuddering. He was still in his sleep clothes, an ancient Television shirt and a pair of soft sweatpants. “Oh. Goosebumps.”

Pete just smiled, and said: “Go look in the mirror.”

Patrick narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but he got up and went into the bathroom — which, like the kitchen, had shrunk, converting itself into a single vanity, rather than double, though they did keep the claw-foot tub and Pete had a special vintage apothecary cabinet just to fit all of his hair and skin care potions. 

“Surprise,” Pete said, draping himself behind Patrick and hooking his chin on his shoulder to watch his reflection in the mirror. “Damn, you look good. I’ve missed your ginger hair.” He ran his fingers through the front of it, curling them between the fine, smooth strands.

“You saw it for, like, all of five minutes,” Patrick said, grumpily — though Pete couldn’t help but notice how he made no attempt to put even an inch of distance between their bodies, and met his gaze in the mirror or nearly did when Pete’s reflection twisted a bit to wink at him. “And anyway, I’m not a ginger.”

“No? What would you call that color?”

“Red gold,” Patrick said. 

“You’re right. Gold suits you.” Pete wrapped one arm around Patrick’s waist and, with his other hand, let go of Patrick’s hair to touch the heart-shaped locket that used to hold Pete’s heart. It now contained an extra-strong protection spell, the one Pete had been working on since before Patrick came into his life. Originally, the spell was supposed to be for himself — hiding him and the house from the eyes of his enemies and shielding them from attacks of malicious magic. But as soon as the new house had gotten its bearings and let him retrieve more valuable ingredients from the pockets of liminal space where he’d kept them, Pete had distilled the spell, placed it in the necklace, and given it to Patrick. Who hadn’t taken it off since — it was the sensible thing to do, naturally, and Pete was trying not to read too much into it. 

Patrick met Pete’s eyes in the mirror with his own — blue and sea-green like diving into the ocean, gold like flying into the sun. They _were_ a wizard’s eyes, and Pete had long suspected Patrick had some magic in him — and felt sure of it, of course, after Patrick had broken Calcifer’s contract and found Pete’s heart, though Patrick had waved it away as a lucky intuition. Not that Pete was thinking about that, or anything else really, as Patrick turned into the circle of his arms and kissed him softly, a gentle press of lips, there and then gone, and put his hands in his hair. 

“Thank you,” Patrick said, his voice so sincere, so full of feeling that Pete didn’t know how to respond. He wanted to explain that he shouldn’t be thanked, that breaking Patrick’s curse, after Patrick had saved him in a thousand ways, was nothing, that it should be _him_ thanking Patrick for staying, despite everything, that he would thank him every day for the rest of their lives. But Pete didn’t know how to talk about his feelings in the regular, human way — not without verbiage and dramatics and monstrous magical projections. So he pressed Patrick back into the sink and kissed him. 

He hadn’t kissed this version of Patrick yet — the one whose voice had bewitched him, Bowie floating through the doorway of an unassuming little shop — and he tried now to make up for lost time, though it wasn’t lost, really, not at all, since they’d spent it together. Not so much getting to know each other, he’d thought more than once, as getting to recognize each other, because Pete — and he was alright with using a cliché when it suited so well, clichés became clichés for a fucking reason, for instance saying that, yes — he felt like he’d known Patrick forever. Perhaps he had. Perhaps, in another life, another universe, they’d been kids together, sneaking glances in class, dancing in the pit at a show, starting a band, maybe — two kids untarnished by magic and fame and plagued only by curfews and homework. Though, of course, magic was what brought them together, either again or for the first time, so it wasn’t all bad — which Pete knew, but couldn’t help but forget, sometimes. Alone, he’d been precipitating through space, but now he’d found a safe place in the black sky, at Patrick’s side. His magic and the magic in Patrick were like twin planets, he felt, orbiting around each other. 

“Oh,” he said out loud, breaking the kiss, as he realized — _this_ was the reason why the curse had gotten so intricate, why he’d had such a hard time unraveling the threads of that spell: someone else’s blood magic entangled with Patrick’s own, locked away in some deep part of him, unacknowledged, unchecked. 

“What?” Patrick asked, suddenly looking very unimpressed. 

“Nothing, just— you,” Pete said, and decided against trying to explain his epiphany — at least not by using words, which Patrick wouldn’t believe, anyway. But he could show him, maybe. He slid his fingers in Patrick’s hair, stroking them back from his forehead, curling a hand around the back of his head, and kissed him and kissed him, until Patrick was clutching at his back and pulling him closer, until they were both out of breath. 

Pete didn’t have fire burning him up from the inside anymore, and he certainly didn’t miss it — though he did miss Calcifer, of course, his absence stinging sharper than the absence of his own heart had done — but _this_ was close, he thought, as Patrick’s hands slid under his shirt and bunched it up, this felt _so close_ to having starlight rushing through his veins again, half-expecting the flash of a spark when their skin finally touched. He leaned back again to catch his breath and Patrick followed blindly, eyes fluttering shut, lips open and wet, hair in complete disarray. Pete held back. If Patrick could see himself like that, he couldn’t possibly deny there was something otherworldly about him — “Turn around,” Pete said, low in Patrick’s ear. 

Patrick made a noise of protest but complied, and Pete pressed close against his back like before — except he was hard inside his jeans now, and Patrick’s ass was soft and round in his sweatpants, and as Pete ground against him, slow and easy, Patrick’s hands flew back to grip his hips and pull him in — the point being, it wasn’t easy to concentrate. But this was important, so Pete said, “Wait,” earning himself another unimpressed glance from Patrick’s reflection, this one verging on resentful. “Trust me,” he went on, but it came out hesitant, almost a question.

Patrick answered with a nod, _yes_ , though he was still frowning at the interruption, and Pete lifted both his own hands and whispered an incantation in each palm. “I couldn’t try this before ‘cause I didn’t want to mess with the curse,” he said. “Now, let’s see… Take off your shirt?” 

Patrick blushed but, again, he did what Pete asked. Before he could start fidgeting, or looking at himself doubtfully as he sometimes did, Pete put one hand over his heart, hovering just an inch above his skin, almost touching but not quite, searching, sending out tendrils of his own magic to seek out Patrick’s. If he was right — and he was — he only had to find the best way to lure it out. He closed his eyes for a second, humming in concentration; he almost got it before it skittered away like a cat, then he reached out again and — Patrick’s gasp startled his eyes open. 

Patrick’s chest was lit up like a fucking christmas tree, small glowing spots of golden light dancing gently just under his skin. “Pete, what the fuck?” 

“Magic-detecting spell,” Pete said, smug. His grin, in the mirror, was so wide that it looked painted on. “I _told you_. Now do you believe me?”

“I mean — yeah, but how…?”

“I don’t know. We can find out. But the important thing is you’re magic and you’re amazing and you’re fucking gorgeous. Now can I blow you?” Should he have let Patrick have his magical identity crisis in peace? Maybe. But he couldn’t keep his hands off him in normal circumstances and he certainly couldn’t now, with him like that, suffused by that warm pulsing light, his magic pulling Pete’s magic in, like the sun making a planet helplessly spin around it. “Please?” he added.

“By all means,” Patrick said, turning to face him again and arching one eyebrow the way he always did when he wanted to appear aloof. Pete went to his knees so fast that he felt dizzy. He curled his hands around Patrick’s hips and pressed a kiss on his stomach, next to one of the bright spots, then another kiss, right over it. It tasted electric. Patrick hissed. 

“How does it feel?” Pete asked, and licked. 

“Oh, fuck,” Patrick said, his voice dropping low. “More.”

“Yeah?” Pete said, and bit down. Patrick shuddered hard, moaned and grabbed at Pete’s hair, and it was all a bit of a blur after that — hooking his fingers under the waistband of Patrick’s sweatpants to shove them down, biting the flesh over Patrick’s hipbone, whining as Patrick pulled at his hair, said _sorry_ , then pulled harder ten seconds later, when Pete wrapped a hand around his dick and started stroking him off, kissing the inside of his thigh, thinking — god, how the fuck was he even still able to think when Patrick made those noises, those breathless, helpless moans — thinking, somehow, that _this_ was really like stoking a fire, like fanning the flames, in which case he was okay with burning down the house, the street, the whole damn city. Then Patrick started begging, softly, gasping, and Pete finally got his mouth around him. God, Patrick was so hard, so hot in his mouth, he wanted to taste him, he wanted to feel him, he wanted fucking everything — Patrick groaned and reached down with the hand that wasn’t buried in Pete’s hair, grasping at nothing until Pete clutched it in his own, squeezing tight. Patrick brought their joined hands up and pressed them over his heart, opening his eyes and looking down at Pete, and he made a sound like the breath had been punched out of him, gasping out, “Pete, Pete, I’m—” and he came down Pete’s throat. 

Pete swallowed it down, closed his eyes, and pulled off. His jaw felt sore, his knees bruised; he was breathing so hard he thought his chest might burst, his heart thumping furiously, his dick achingly hard. He couldn’t think straight; his magic felt raw and buzzed wildly in his head. He pressed his cheek against Patrick’s thigh and tried to ground himself. Then Patrick’s hands were on him, strong and sure, and he was being pulled up, and kissed, sweet and shallow, and steered out of the bathroom and to the bed. 

He let Patrick guide him down until he was stretched out on his back, then Patrick was lying beside him and kissing him, kissing him, kissing him — Pete could get lost, would very happily get lost in kissing Patrick, like, there was kissing and then there was kissing _Patrick_ , and it didn’t fucking compare. 

“Pete, Pete,” Patrick said, over and over, running his palm down Pete’s chest, his stomach, lower, getting his jeans undone, curling his fingers around him, stroking him off so slow that it should have been teasing, it shouldn’t have been enough, but somehow it was just right, just what Pete needed to be pushed right over the edge. 

  
  


Patrick had taken the call in the other room, and left Pete sprawled on his back in their bed and in his sweats, scrolling through Twitter on his own phone, but Pete could still make out Joe on the other line, saying, nearly exasperated: “You’re just figuring this out _now_?” after Patrick had recounted every weird thing that had happened over the past few weeks, including the revelation, thanks to Pete’s assistance, that he apparently had some sort of magic in him.

Joe went on, somehow growing louder, though Pete doubted Patrick placed him on speaker: “You know that regular people can’t learn to play the harp in a couple of hours, don’t you? You know that regular people don’t _talk to guitars_ , right?” 

Pete had to stifle a laugh at that, covering his mouth with one hand — picturing with absolute clarity the tiny, child version of Patrick picking up _any_ instrument and immediately tuning it to perfection. Of course Joe was rolling his eyes over it. Pete almost rolled his eyes at himself, too, for not figuring it out the moment Patrick made the otamatone sing in a way that Pete hadn’t even thought possible, let alone heard before. He had to muffle another laugh when he heard Patrick reply, primly: “There’s no need to be that way.” 

There was the sound of a spoon clinking against the side of a cup, a clattering like a jar opening. “Anyway,” Patrick then said, “I thought that was me being weird, how was I supposed to know it was fucking _magic_?”

Pete couldn’t resist seeing what undoubtedly surly expression Patrick would be making at his tea, so he forced himself up, rolling out of bed and further rumpling the duvet, his bare feet hitting the floor. He stumbled into the living room and leant up against the doorframe there, crossing his arms and fondly watching Patrick furiously stir honey into his tea while sat in the breakfast nook. 

“Patrick,” Joe was saying, the long-suffering sigh evident even from across the room and over the phone. “Why do you think grandma had it in for wizards?” 

“Uhm,” Patrick tried. “Anti-magic prejudice?” But Pete could see the wince he made, as if embarrassed and anticipating the outraged response. 

“No!” The _idiot_ was heavily implied; Joe didn’t disappoint, and Pete took a step forward, nearly frowning, feeling a bit protective then, like he wanted to wrap his arms over Patrick, hold him as he had his world rocked by this news. “Because she fell in love with one and he knocked her up and fucked off and she had to raise mom alone!”

“ _Really_?” Patrick sputtered, and his whole face furrowed, deep in thought; he rose and left his tea at the table, getting up to pace through the living room. “I didn’t know! I thought they were just stories! No one ever talked about anything in our family.”

His pacing had taken him round the couch and closer to Pete — and he paused as he caught Pete watching, who didn’t have it in him to feel very embarrassed, waving his hand in greeting instead, wiggling his fingers, letting his smile loose at last. 

Patrick waved back, a smile of his own flickering across his face, even as Joe was going on: “Well, she didn’t exactly go around advertising it, but I heard some things here and there when we were kids, and I thought you had, too — except you were probably too busy, I don’t know, teaching yourself the trumpet or tuba or something.”

“Statistically, yeah,” Patrick said nonchalantly, far less annoyed, probably from how his face had bloomed into a smile, which Pete took the credit for; Patrick’s eyes were still trained onto Pete, so he opened his arm up in an invitation, which Patrick accepted, coming nearer as he muttered into the phone: “So, any other secret family drama you’ve been holding back from me?” He rolled his eyes a little at Joe, as if to tell Pete, _Can you believe him?_

But then Joe said: “Nah, I think that’s it. Anyway — how’s _Pete_?” 

And Pete was enormously grateful for the front-row seat to Patrick’s cheeks suddenly going from gorgeously pale and touched with gold to a fetching pink. “Oh,” Patrick said, blanching again. “He’s good,” he glanced up at Pete, as if to check. “We’re good, we, uhm—” He trailed off, shrugging at Pete, lost for words. 

Pete would rescue him, but he was a bit busy admiring the up-close view of Patrick, and shifting away Patrick’s hand that held the phone to his ear so that Pete could sneak in a kiss because it had been far too long. He let one kiss linger at the shell of Patrick’s ear, beside the phone, and then another at the corner of his mouth, before Patrick turned his head, his mouth seeking Pete’s, a bit desperate to find him, one hand clinging to Pete’s low-slung waistband, fisting in the soft material of his sweats. 

“Fuck, I knew it,” Joe crowed, already laughing, from the phone, which seemed to be growing further and further away. “You should have seen your face at that party. Oh, oh — wait. If you two are a thing, does that mean Ashlee Simpson is single? Patrick? Are you still there?” 

  
  


Pete should’ve known that something as plainly simple as trying to do a solid for Joe by passing his number along to Ashlee would be entirely misconstrued by the press — because of course it was, and of course he was still being tailed by the paps, despite not exactly having the most impressive personal effects in his possession any longer nor attending any high-end parties nor rubbing elbows with all the right people. (In fact, he’d been ignoring Perez’s persistent calls all together; he’d ditched even the MTV Awards and the accompanying after-party, after which Andy had simply stopped reminding him of any red carpet events he was _supposed_ to attend.) 

Luckily, Patrick didn’t seem too bothered by the flashing headline (“Pete Wentz’s Mystery Blonde Not So Mysterious”) and the photos that had been snapped of Pete and Ashlee exiting Joan’s On Third earlier that morning; they appeared online nearly instantly: the telescopic lens had captured Pete’s red, retro shades that always slid down his nose and the EREWHON hoodie that he shrugged over last night’s sleep shirt before he had barrelled out the door to the other side of town (only twelve minutes late, per usual) next to Ashlee’s perfectly coiffed hair and heeled booties and glossy t-shirt dress. He winced for her sake, more than his, as he scrolled through the series of photos on his phone while lounging against their plush, soft leather couch cushions, and wondered if paparazzi ever had anything better to do on a Sunday.

“You know,” Patrick said conversationally, “I never cared about any of that.” 

When Pete dragged his gaze away from his phone, he found Patrick’s eyes waiting and bright above him as Patrick stood near the end of the couch’s armrest. He’d bothered to shower and dress in Pete’s morning absence, as if they’d be _going_ somewhere today, though, looking at him in another one of those oversized knit sweaters that he kept stealing from Pete’s closet, Pete couldn’t imagine them going anywhere at all for any reason. He reached out to hook his hand behind Patrick’s leg and tug him in, bring him closer. 

Patrick jolted a little — a quiet _oomph_ — but didn’t resist, saying as he went, “If anything, I owe you a thank you.” He gave into Pete’s urging and climbed aboard, straddling Pete’s lap on the couch, one knee on either side of Pete’s hips.

Pete threw his phone aside onto the cushions in favor of clasping his hands together around Patrick’s waist, just above his ass. “Do you?” he said, a grin biting at his mouth, his interest piqued by Patrick running his hand through Pete’s hair, tangling in it, the lazy way he murmured, “Mm-hmm,” as if something else was on his mind, his eyes growing half-lidded. Not that Pete ever exactly needed encouragement in getting distracted by Patrick. “Whatever for?” Pete tried anyway. 

“Well, really, it’s for Joe. But also for me — it’ll finally get him off my case, if Ashlee gives him a call. Actually, I suspect he’ll forget about me entirely,” Patrick said, a hint of a smirk at the corner of his mouth now. 

But that made Pete frown a bit: “I don’t see how anyone could _forget_ about you —”

“Trust me,” Patrick interrupted, shushing him. “That wasn’t a complaint.” He draped his arms around Pete’s neck. “It suits me just fine. Plenty to keep me occupied,” he said, and then dragged his eyes down Pete’s chest to his hips, one hand sliding down just a beat behind his gaze. “Right here,” he emphasized it by palming Pete through his jeans. 

“Jesus, Patrick,” Pete said, and then couldn’t resist any longer — even though it had only been since that morning — and dove forward into Patrick’s awaiting, lush mouth and the glow beneath his delicious skin and that teasing twinkle in his eye, getting lost in it, in the smooth, silky feel of him, in holding him close so that they both didn’t topple over, though Pete had half a mind to pick Patrick up and carry him back to bed.

At least, until there was a knock at the door — which Pete first decided was far less urgent than kissing down the line of Patrick’s neck and growling, “Don’t know why you bothered getting dressed,” into his ear, but the knocking became quite persistent, enough that Patrick drew away, flushed and a touch sweaty, his glasses fogging up, and gasped, “Pete, wait, that might be important.”

And of course Pete immediately said, “What could be more important than this,” to which Patrick gave him a disapproving look, so then Pete amended himself and said, “Fine, fine, I’m _going_ ,” and forced himself away, giving one last lingering look at Patrick on their couch, the beautiful, glowing flush from his cheeks down his chest standing out against the dark brown leather; Pete wanted to memorize the magnificent scowl he was wearing and recreate it later in paint or words or something, anything to preserve it. Patrick raised an eyebrow and made a shooing motion, so Pete sighed and finally turned toward the door, crossing the living room. 

He glanced at his discarded hoodie from earlier slung over the kitchen chair that he passed on the way, and then thought that whoever dared bother him at a time like this would just have to deal with shirtlessness and half-unbuttoned jeans. He did go through the trouble of holding his jeans up with one hand so that they didn’t drop to the floor and kind of hiding his fading hard-on behind the door as he opened it, already frowning at whoever was there, and demanding, “ _What_?” 

Though he absolutely didn’t expect for it to be Perez stood there — in a dreadfully turquoise all-plaid suit, including a waistcoat and teal tie paired with blindingly silver alligator loafers that kind of made Pete want to throw up in his mouth a little bit, definitely ruining the mood, especially with the matching outraged expression painted on Perez’s face. 

“Excuse me,” Perez cut in, snapping. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to keep guests waiting.” He threw his hair back, and then said, “You’ve been dodging my calls for weeks now.” His chin jutted out at a haughty angle, as if he’d caught Pete in some clever trap. 

But all Pete could think to say was, “Right.” And — perhaps it wasn’t strange at all, given all that had transpired — it was as if Perez was aiming at a target that simply didn’t exist anymore, that had been dissolved into thin air; the usual dread and terror was nowhere to be found. Instead, Pete felt his heart — his real, whole heart — beat comfortingly and reassuringly beneath his chest.

Even as Perez barged in, throwing open Pete’s door, which collided into him, and snarled into the room, “Well, aren’t you going to invite me into your _humble abode_.” 

And then Perez glanced around the room, surely taking in the grand total of two rooms, about as wide, together, as Pete’s former dining hall had been; the mess of his books and Patrick’s records jumbled together, awaiting some kind of sorting in their piles on the scratched and discolored hardwood floor; the crooked row of succulents in small mismatched vases on the windowsill, rescued by Patrick from his own apartment; the modest, upright piano, transfigured from the Bösendorfer that Patrick had, at last, been able to restore. The indignant expression seemed to melt from his face, like a mask peeling off. “What _is_ this?” He hissed. “Where is all your — where is your _mansion_?” 

“Well, you see,” Pete started, rubbing his hand behind his head, still using the other to keep his jeans from slipping. “The thing is—”

Perez was spluttering: “And who is _that_?” He pointed one shaking, insistent finger across the room, which Pete followed, turning to look, and found Patrick on the other end, wrapped up only in Pete’s oversized sweater and not much else, just as Pete had left him, his hair mussed, like Pete’s own must be, and his mouth swollen from all the kisses Pete had laid on him, the flush still there but tempered by the hard, cold look stolen over his face; his eyes were glittering beneath his glasses, but not playfully or teasingly like they were earlier, instead like embers in a pit of ash, waiting to rise. 

“I don’t know what fucking trick you’re playing at here,” Perez said, loudly, swinging his finger to point it into Pete’s face, who took a step back reflexively for some room, still gripping his jeans at his hip with one hand and half-heartedly raising the other as if to ward off Perez’s offending finger. “But you need to _stop_.” His voice was seething with rage, his whole face contorted with it, turning a hideous, deep red that veered on purple. 

“The thing is,” Pete tried again, narrowing his eyes and sharpening his tone. “I _don’t_.”

“How dare you—” Perez started, thundering. 

But Pete cut him off this time: “Let me be perfectly clear. Whatever information you think you have on me? It’s worthless. Obsolete. Whatever favor you think I owe you? No such thing. I don’t owe you shit. Whatever fucked-up arrangement you think we have? It’s _over_. So—” 

Sometime through Pete talking, he must have been stalking closer, cornering Perez by the partially open door, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, and it wasn’t until he felt Patrick reach for him — or rather Patrick’s magic, golden tendrils seeking Pete’s own — one hand holding Pete’s arm back, that he snapped into realization, and paused, breathing a bit hard. 

“So,” Patrick said, picking up right where Pete had left off, his voice softer and lower, but no less threatening than Pete’s own must’ve been. He felt Patrick take a deep breath and let it out on a hum, almost singing; at that, something in the air snapped, like a twig breaking, and Perez gasped aloud. “ _There_ ,” Patrick went on. “Let that teach you to meddle with things that belong to me. Now get out, and don’t come back.” 

Perez — for the first time ever since Pete had met him — seemed terrified, caught wildly off-guard. “You—” he spluttered nonsensically, and then threw his hands up, and actually turned tail, shouting, “Don’t think you have seen the last of me!” as he went, the door slamming shut behind him as if the house itself ushered him out.

With him gone, something else seemed to seep out of Pete’s skin, like exhaling a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, never to return again, too. He stared at the shut door until Patrick curled over his shoulders. One of his hands came down to stroke at Pete’s chest, his fingers making little, meandering designs against Pete’s skin. He murmured into Pete’s ear: “Alright?” 

“Yeah, alright,” Pete confirmed, meaning it, and turned in Patrick’s arms to get a good look at him. “What did you _do_ to him?”

“I mean, you know I’m new at this, so — I _think_ I shut down his ability to appropriate other people’s magic… or I might have given him like, a really bad case of heartburn. Not sure,” Patrick shrugged as if that was hardly anything, which was definitely not the case, though he had a smile edging in, which Pete couldn’t help from returning.

“Either way,” Pete said, wrapping his own arms around Patrick’s middle and pulling him close. “That was seriously hot. Now, where were we?” 

  
  


       
_  
**Overcast Books  
www.overcastbooks.com**   
_   


    _This independent bookstore on S Spring St, Los Angeles might look small and unobtrusive among the Downtown bustle, but step through the door and you will find a real hidden treasure. Though the aesthetic skews heavily toward the Victorian gothic — think velvet curtains, dark wood, chandeliers, even a working fireplace tucked in a back corner — the two-level space feels light and airy, almost bigger on the inside. The offerings are eclectic — poetry first and foremost, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, as well as literary fiction, books on music, art, film and theatre, and a selection of wonderfully weird titles about everything esoteric, from astrology to tarot reading to herbal medicine. Just as eclectic is the clientele, which includes local artists, musicians, and writers. (Fun fact: the owner is former celeb Pete Wentz, who left the glam life behind to invest in this space and, apparently, work on his own poetry. Talk about hidden depths!) Grab a book, some coffee (the cold brew is amazing), and a cupcake courtesy of the nearby vegan café, Caffeine Cold_ — _owned by local hardcore act Sect’s drummer Andy Hurley_ — _and snuggle up in one the many reading nooks scattered on the upper floor. Or stop by for the Friday open mic night, featuring a mix of slam poetry, spoken word, and acoustic performances._

  
  


The watch lying on the bedside table and looking like Pete felt — drowsy and the worse for wear — had written on its face the words _too early_. Pete closed his eyes and savored the post-dream state for five more minutes. Once upon a time, that is to say, a few weeks before, those five minutes had been more often than not the best part of his day, a pleasant daze until he'd remembered his life. Now, though — _remembering_ meant his heart safely tucked away in his chest, Patrick safely tucked away next to him in bed. It also meant rubbing his fingers together and feeling the meteor tattoo shift gently on his skin, warm, as he sent a short burst of magic into the universe — a thought, a prayer, something akin to wishing on a star, something like _I miss you_ and _I hope you’re happy_. He would stop, one of those days, but not yet. 

Pete’s ongoing war with his own moods was going through a tentative détente — no fire in his veins to ignite mania; no coldness everywhere he touched, freezing his ability to feel anything; even sleep didn’t elude him as much as before, now that his bed didn’t appear as vast, empty, and cold as the night desert. So he’d gotten mornings back, and often he even awoke before Patrick’s alarm — an old record player that Pete had charmed to play whatever album Patrick felt like listening to — but he didn’t get up, because watching Patrick sleep was still one of his favorite pleasures, even now that it was no longer a forbidden one. When the turntable started playing “Low” or “This Year’s Model” and Patrick finally opened his eyes, Pete would curl up close to him and do his best to make him late. The bookstore opening hours were eccentric, verging on chaotic, while Patrick never failed to open his own shop at 10 o’clock, Monday to Friday and alternating Saturdays between him and Joe — but lately, that was often achieved by falling out of bed with ten minutes to spare, stumbling into the bathroom and getting ready in a mad dash; luckily he didn’t need to travel far — between the house reconfiguring itself, it had managed to pull Patrick’s shop quite close, just downstairs. Still Patrick grumbled about the lateness and the rushing and having to skip breakfast to get out the door in time — but he also smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, running his fingers lightly over the bruises on his collarbone like Pete’s fingerprints. And he always, always kissed Pete goodbye before leaving. 

Pete knew that this wasn’t completely healthy, but he just had the hardest time not seizing every possible opportunity to fool around with Patrick, because — who knew how long he had before Patrick finally realized what a disastrous mostly-human being he’d taken up with? (Also, it was mind-blowing, earth-shattering sex with a magic-compatible person he was crazy in love with, and Pete had never claimed not to be weak.) Which was what he’d been telling Andy, sparing him the hot-magical-sex details as per his express request, when Andy had slapped him over the back of his head — not very hard, but still. “Ow.” 

“Quit it,” Andy had said. “Patrick is so fucking in love with you that it’s quite literally sickening. Just stop jumping him at the ass-crack of dawn, like a creep, and buy him some fucking breakfast. Does he like red velvet?”

“That’s — a really great idea, Andy, thank you. But you can keep your really delicious cupcakes, dude. I am going to _make_ him breakfast.”

So, Pete got out of bed before Patrick, at least for that one morning. He started the coffee brewing and got the ingredients from the pantry — and a couple of vials from the _other_ pantry, because regular recipes were _boring_ and what was even the point of being a wizard if he couldn’t surprise the love of his life with pancakes who smelled like his best childhood memory and had an aftertaste of sunrise? 

By the time Nina Simone started singing _I Put a Spell on You_ from the other room, a small stack of fluffy, golden, only slightly burned pancakes was ready, the second to last still in the skillet. As he waited for it to cook, Pete started to fix his hair, by habit, before catching himself. He’d noticed that walking around with messy, curling hair led to Patrick pressing him against various flat surfaces in the apartment and kissing him hungrily. He wasn’t complaining — in fact, his flat-iron had been lying abandoned at the back of a drawer for several days now. 

“What are you doing up?” Patrick asked somewhere behind him, and Pete just smiled, twisting his head back to look at him standing in the doorway, rumpled and gorgeous, his face even more open without his glasses, so smooth — which still threw Pete, sometimes, as if he unconsciously expected to see Patrick as an old man, the wrinkles somehow even more familiar than his true appearance. At times it felt like he’d met Patrick twice, and come to adore him each time; he suspected there was no version of Patrick in any possible universe who would yield different results.

“Hmm?” Patrick shuffled closer, smiling back. “I was going to tell you to come back to bed, but this smells amazing. It smells like… the grass in my Grandma’s garden that time we had an Easter egg hunt with my cousins when I was like, five?”

“That would be the magic ingredient,” Pete said, and flipped the pancake.

“What, nostalgia? Oh, you mean literally.” Patrick came up behind him and put his arms around his waist. “Look at that. Magic pancakes. With asphodel or mandrake or… something.”

“Or something,” Pete confirmed, leaning back into Patrick. He scooped the pancake up and onto the top of the stack, then poured the last of the batter to make a final, sadly misshapen one. Patrick let him work, then squeezed him tighter and nestled his face into the side of his neck. 

“So I’ve been thinking,” he mumbled, half muffled into Pete’s skin. “The counterspell worked.” 

Pete hummed and waved his spatula – _go on_.

“Does that mean that — you know. You have a crush on me, or whatever?”

The spatula landed unceremoniously on the counter as Pete turned around in a flash and framed Patrick’s face in both hands. 

“A _crush_?” Patrick watched him with wide eyes, nodding silently — but his arms found their way back to Pete’s waist, where he grabbed two handfuls of hoodie. “I don’t have a _crush_ on you, Patrick.”

“No?” Patrick looked — preposterously — as if he still hadn’t grasped the magnitude of Pete’s devotion; as if he still thought that Pete might harbor some desire to ever kiss somebody else, fuck somebody else, give his words to somebody else. 

“ _Of course_ no, this is not a crush, this is true love and shit. In fact, listen — I think we ought to live happily ever after.”

“Yeah? Like in a fairy tale?” Patrick asked, pulling Pete closer until they were pressed together, chest to chest, hips to hips, legs tangled. 

“Exactly like that,” Pete said, and closed the very small distance between them to kiss Patrick until every one of his doubts was dispelled. 

  


  


If Patrick or Pete had had any attention to spare, they might have noticed that the pancake still in the skillet wasn’t burning — and it should’ve burned, by rights, as they kissed and kissed and kissed, quite unable to stop. But the burner had turned itself off on the stove, as if by magic, which it probably was, and then a whiny, crackling voice said, “Oh my god, have you guys been kissing this whole time? Gross.”

“Calcifer?” Pete said, and had to clear his throat because his voice was strangely hoarse. The fire demon looked like his tiny flame self, but blue, hovering in the air next to Pete’s head and flickering in an affectionate manner, like a cat rubbing its head to be petted. “You didn’t need to come back.”

“I know, but clearly you need me,” Calcifer said. “You were going to burn the kitchen just now! Besides, it’s too cold in the asteroid belt.”

  
  


_omg, the end_


End file.
